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    Forbidden, Book 4: Lady Sotheby's Curse
    Forbidden, Book 4: Lady Sotheby's Curse
    Forbidden, Book 4: Lady Sotheby's Curse
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    Forbidden, Book 4: Lady Sotheby's Curse

    By Mike Wells and Devika Fernando

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    About this ebook

    Jayne Clark is now living an entirely new life in Oxford, England, with Robert Astor, the man she loves. As her horrific memories of Lady Eleanor Sotheby finally start to fade, a blackmail letter arrives out of the blue. Unless huge payments are made, the blackmailer will destroy Robert’s good name and his family’s reputation, not to mention Jayne’s relationship with her business partner and the new restaurant they’re starting together. Looming even larger is Jayne and Robert’s happiness as a couple. Can they track down the malicious criminal before all is lost?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Wells
    Release dateJun 30, 2017
    ISBN9781370918966
    Forbidden, Book 4: Lady Sotheby's Curse
    Author

    Mike Wells

    Mike Wells is an author of both walking and cycling guides. He has been walking long-distance footpaths for 25 years, after a holiday in New Zealand gave him the long-distance walking bug. Within a few years, he had walked the major British trails, enjoying their range of terrain from straightforward downland tracks through to upland paths and challenging mountain routes. He then ventured into France, walking sections of the Grande Randonnee network (including the GR5 through the Alps from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean), and Italy to explore the Dolomites Alta Via routes. Further afield, he has walked in Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway and Patagonia. Mike has also been a keen cyclist for over 20 years. After completing various UK Sustrans routes, such as Lon Las Cymru in Wales and the C2C route across northern England, he then moved on to cycling long-distance routes in continental Europe and beyond. These include cycling both the Camino and Ruta de la Plata to Santiago de la Compostela, a traverse of Cuba from end to end, a circumnavigation of Iceland and a trip across Lapland to the North Cape. He has written a series of cycling guides for Cicerone following the great rivers of Europe.

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      Book preview

      Forbidden, Book 4 - Mike Wells

      Forbidden

      Book 4 – Lady Sotheby’s Curse

      Mike Wells

      Devika Fernando

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2017 Mike Wells and Devika Fernando

      This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblances to persons living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

      Prologue

      Geneva, Switzerland

      Spite.

      Resentment.

      Rage.

      These were the emotions cloying the air as the shocking blackmail letter slowly took form. The text had already been composed, on the plane to Geneva, Switzerland, written in pencil on a legal pad with many corrections until the tone and language were perfect. The damning letter was sophisticated yet nasty at the same time. Oh yes, it would achieve the desired results.

      Now, hunched over a desk in a Swiss hotel room, the blackmailer was using a pair of tweezers to painstakingly glue individual letters, cut from British tabloid newspapers, onto a blank sheet of paper. Of course, in these modern times there were other ways to send such a missive—safer ways, perhaps—but the impact would not have been as powerful. Even half finished, the letter was shocking simply in its appearance, with the different type fonts and colors, some letters in capitals and others in lower case, arranged in not-quite-straight lines across the paper. There was something vicious about the way it looked, as if the person sending it were slightly deranged, and perhaps dangerous.

      This was good. This was very good.

      Also on the hotel room desk were two high quality color photos that had been torn from tabloid newspapers. According to the captions, one picture showed international socialite Celeste Sotheby frolicking on the beach with one of her young lovers. The other photo, from an article that had been published a year later in the same tabloid, also appeared to show Celeste Sotheby in the companionship of a man—in this picture, she was sitting next to her fiancé, the young, dashing British aristocrat Robert Astor. They were dining together at a Paris restaurant, a few months before their wedding. Such a lovely couple, exchanging adoring glances, oozing money and status from every pore.

      But there was a big, delicious secret, a secret that no one in the world except Robert and his family knew about. The smiling, well-dressed girl sitting there next to Robert Astor was not Celeste Sotheby but a girl who simply looked exactly like Celeste. Said girl was, in fact, Jayne Clark, a nobody from Wichita, Kansas. Separated at birth, Jayne was Celeste’s twin sister.

      This mysterious twin had come over from America, to her sister’s rescue, because her stupid sibling had gotten herself pregnant by another man while engaged to Robert Astor. Jayne had posed as Celeste while the real Celeste was hidden away in Southern France and secretly gave birth to the child.

      Such a devious plan, one had to admit that.

      But alas, the wedding had never taken place. Jayne and Robert had fallen in love, and apparently, even though the bitch had scammed him by impersonating her sister, he had forgiven her and they were now quietly living together in Oxford, England.

      She and Robert were going to pay, or the whole world would know about their sordid past.

      If you studied the two tabloid photos very closely, side-by-side, with the aid of a magnifying glass, there was one slight but crucial anatomical difference between the two females in the photos. This subtle difference had been highlighted with bright red circles of magic marker, courtesy of the criminal mind so diligently at work at the moment.

      * * *

      The following afternoon, the blackmailer entered Terminal 3 of Heathrow International Airport pulling a carry-on, wearing dark sunglasses, a stylish hat, and a light knee-length coat. To the casual observer, the outfit did not look like a disguise but rather like the attire of an air traveler with bad taste who was trying to appear chic.

      The damning letter, addressed with a computer-printed label and affixed with two self-adhesive postage stamps, was inside the coat pocket. A piece of blank paper was folded in half around it so that it would not have to be touched with bare fingers, which might leave prints on the envelope. Wearing gloves in the airport, in June, would attract too much attention—even bad taste would not account for that.

      The mastermind behind this wicked plan casually headed towards the post office, but not without some hesitation. The CCTV cameras scattered everywhere around the airport would not be a problem, because only the police could access their recordings. Although Jayne would immediately tell Robert about the letter when she received it, neither Robert nor his socially-prominent parents—the esteemed Lord and Lady Astor—could afford to get the police involved. If they did that, all bets were off. Robert Astor would most likely hire a private detective to investigate. The risks were minimal.

      On the other hand, if caught, extortion was a serious crime—in the UK, you could go to jail for up to fourteen years if convicted for it.

      A few minutes later, the criminal entered the post office.

      ...with a pounding heart, approached the letter box...

      There were a few annoyed-looking people standing in line at the counters.

      …no one paying any attention...

      This is it, the blackmailer thought. Once I push this envelope through the slot, there’s no turning back.

      Chapter 1

      Oxford, United Kingdom

      Two Days Later

      Jayne Clark rounded the corner briskly, her arms full of files stacked precariously on top of each other—and smacked right into someone coming the other way.

      The collision brought her stumbling to her knees with a winded oomph.

      For a moment, she sat amid the scattered papers, blinking and wondering idly whether the whining sound in her ears was yet another carpenter with a drill straight from hell or whether the past few days had triggered a tinnitus.

      If she had known opening her own restaurant would be that much work and stress, she would never have embarked on the endeavor. But then she reminded herself how lucky she was to finally be living with Robert Astor, the man she loved. With his encouragement and support, she felt as if she could accomplish anything.

      Verrry sorrrry, ma’am. So incrrredibly sorrrry.

      The Indian electrician who had collided with her managed somehow to blush beneath his chocolate-colored skin. He was hovering close by, gesticulating frantically and clearly torn between apologizing profusely and wondering whether it was the right thing to do to help her to her feet.

      With a defeated sigh, Jayne scrabbled for the papers and stuffed them into the files. By the time she had gathered everything and managed to climb to her feet despite her throbbing knee, the man in his blue overalls was wringing his hands and still apologizing.

      It’s all right, for god’s sake, it’s not like I need an ambulance. He looked relieved.

      She half-jogged and half-limped down the stairs and along a corridor filled with dust and noise from all the workers trying to meet the deadline. As if to taunt her, the banner hanging out front caught her eye in passing.

      THE CALIFORNIAN RESTAURANT – GRAND OPENING JULY 18th

      Despite the nagging sound in her ears and the dull pain in her knee, Jayne couldn’t help smile a little. Even with the humungous workload and countless responsibilities, it was still a dream come true.

      She was only 24 years old, but with Robert’s and Beatrice’s investment and their generous help, she was going to open her own restaurant, for heaven’s sake! And in Oxford, England! All the stress and hard work made it worthwhile.

      A still door-less doorway opened into the main kitchen. The room served as an interim office for now, because the bare counters made an excellent replacement for desks and because the actual office was jam-packed with furniture in its protective wrappings.

      She squinted against the visual overload and finally found her business partner back towards a corner. An elegant woman in a sharp pantsuit in unforgiving black stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of the chaos.

      Jayne shook her head softly. She’d never understand why Beatrice Egerton-Jones would choose to wear these expensive and sorely out of place clothes inside the restaurant under construction, but she’d come to associate it with the young woman and admired how clean and unwrinkled she somehow managed to keep it at the end of each busy day. It was as typical and tell-tale as her penchant for emeralds and her weakness for Jayne’s raspberry tartlets.

      Beatrice! she yelled, having to repeat herself twice before the woman’s head snapped up from studying a rolled-out site plan.

      She waved at Jayne for a second before wheeling around and shouting an order at a man armed with a hammer and nails.

      Jayne walked over, maneuvering around cardboard boxes, toolboxes and a tile-less hole in the floor, left open for god knew what last-minute adjustment.

      Jayne. Beatrice pecked her on both cheeks once she’d set her mountain of files down and narrowly missed dumping them on the floor again. You look a mite frazzled, if I may say so. Not that we don’t all have a million reasons for being frazzled. Even shouting so she could be heard over the din, Beatrice sounded posh and proper.

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