AMANDA BROWNING - Enemy Within

‘You’ll come again when Leah and Peter return?’

‘Oh, I think you can safely bet money on that, Sophie,’ Ryan drawled with grim amusement, shaking her hand and heading for the door.

Mickey was once more enfolded in a warm embrace.

‘That’s one angry man, Mickey.’

‘Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so angry if you’d told him everything,’ Mickey challenged, looking the older woman straight in the eye.

Sophie laughed. ‘Dear child, what can you mean?’

Exasperated, Mickey sighed. ‘You’re sending me on a wild-goose chase, and I don’t appreciate it.’

‘Then you should. There’s colour in your cheeks and a sparkle in your eye, Mickey. Ask yourself who put them there. Now run along. He’s not the sort I’d want to keep waiting, although you seem to be blooming on it!’ Sophie declared softly, and Mickey sent her a startled look.

‘You haven’t heard the last of it. I’ll be back, on my own, and I’ll expect answers!’ she declared, before going to join the man standing impatiently on the porch.

Ryan didn’t utter a word until they were once more in the jeep and on their way back to the city. ‘She’s quite a character.’

She wondered if he realised just how much of a character Sophie was, and found out in the next second.

‘Getting the facts out of her is like trying to wade through treacle! Those two don’t need an army when they’ve got Sophie Trenchard on their side!’

His perception brought a reluctant smile to her lips. ‘One of a kind,’ she acknowledged wryly, and he laughed, so that it seemed for a moment they were in accord. Mickey found it strangely unsettling.

‘One is quite sufficient. Hell, they could be anywhere, and the only one who knows is pretending she lives in Cloud-cuckoo-land!’ he growled, thumping his fist on the steering-wheel. ‘Not that you seem to be surprised, Hanlon. Were you banking on her running interference for you? Are you still going to insist you knew nothing about it?’

That brief moment of empathy vanished. ‘If I had, we wouldn’t be sitting here now! I don’t know how your sainted nephew managed to seduce my sister, but I’m going to put a stop to it. Damn him; Leah had everything going for her until he came along!’ Mickey cried wrathfully.

Beside her, Ryan laughed grimly. ‘Well, they say it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody something good. Look on the bright side, Hanlon. I’m going after them, and you’re going to take me. So it looks as if you’re going to get paid after all.’

‘MORNING, Sid,’ Mickey mumbled as she walked into the hangar next morning, smothering a yawn behind her hand.

The grizzled mechanic sent her a grin. ‘Hiya, Mickey. Up early, ain’t ye?’

A lack of sleep had done nothing to sweeten her mood, nor the dreadful meal she had had with Ryan Douglas after they had returned to his hotel last night. Not that the meal had been bad, just the company. It was as well she had scarcely eaten anything or she would have suffered from indigestion as well as a sleepless night.

‘Mr “God Almighty” Douglas insists on catching the light!’ she grunted irritably, keeping up a fiction which Ryan had insisted on. To all intents and purposes, they would be out taking photographs. For once she had not argued. She didn’t want anyone to know what they would really be doing either. Publicity of the kind this search would produce, if the story ever got out, was the very last thing either of them needed.

Shaggy eyebrows rose at hearing the unaccustomed grumble. ‘Sounds a reasonable request to me, Mickey,’ Sid remonstrated, with the ease of long acquaintance, and she sighed heavily.

‘It is, but he isn’t,’ she snapped, unwilling to concede more than she had to. Over a dinner which she had barely touched, Ryan had reiterated his intentions in no uncertain terms, and, considering they had the same aim, although admittedly differing viewpoints, there hadn’t been anything she could reasonably take exception to. Except his persistence in still seeing Leah as a girl with her eye on the main chance, a charge she had countered by declaring his odious nephew had taken advantage of Leah’s sweet nature.

Her fleeting sympathy towards Peter Douglas had vanished with the knowledge that he had induced her sister to run off with him, abandoning a bright future. She couldn’t believe that Leah really loved him. What did she know about love? She had lived a rather sheltered existence. As far as Mickey knew, she hadn’t even had a real boyfriend. No, she had been seduced into thinking she was in love by a handsome face and a blinding charm! She couldn’t know that love to such men was just an illusion, just a word glossing over needs of a far earthier nature.

What Mickey was so dreadfully afraid of was that Leah would find out too late. She didn’t want her to be hurt and disillusioned the way she herself had been. God, she would do anything to protect Leah from that. She’d get her away from the clutches of that playboy if it was the last thing she did!

Which perversely gave her something in common with Ryan after all. Neither wanted this match, and they were determined to put a stop to it. But first of all they had to find the elusive runaways.

Sid, meanwhile, waved a piece of oily rag in her direction. ‘Ain’t you never heard you catch more flies with molasses, Mickey?’ he observed, and she came out of her reverie with a start.

‘If you think I’m going to stroke his male ego just to keep him sweet, you’re on the wrong track. I’m sorry, Sid, but I just can’t stand the man.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ he drawled, and cocked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘You gonna take her for a test run?’

Mickey looked from the float plane to her watch. Time was getting on, and already the sun was rising higher. ‘There won’t be time; I’ll have to check her as we go. Give Amelia her maximum fuel load, please, Sid. I’ll do my checks as soon as I’ve found my charts.’

Sid tipped a finger in acknowledgement, and Mickey hurried into the office, but not before his half-muttered comment reached her ears. ‘Artistic temperament they call it, girl. You gotta learn how to handle it.’

Mickey grimaced as she closed the door and leant back against it. She knew all about artistic temperament, and had spent the greater portion of her life pacifying it.

As a tiny child, Mickey’s earliest memories of her mother were of being kissed goodnight by a glittering princess, or of playing with her dolls on the bathroom floor while this beautiful angel bathed in water that emitted intoxicating scents. Of course, she hadn’t realised then that her mother was Tanita Amory, the Hollywood actress. She had been some god-like creature who had welcomed a little girl into her glowing world.

She had no memories of her real father, knowing only that he had been Michael Hanlon, a Canadian pilot. She had known little more about the succession of men who became her stepfathers for one or two years as she grew up. What she had learned was that her mother was so wrapped up in these men that she had very little time for her daughter. Tanita had lavished love on her by giving her all the things money could buy, but not by giving of herself.

By the time Mickey entered her teenage years, the marriages had given way to a procession of lovers. There were always new men around. Wherever they went, Tanita had flirted outrageously. Although Mickey loved her mother, she had hated her free and easy lifestyle. Tanita positively basked in the Press stories about her latest lover or husband, even as her daughter grew to hate it.

Mickey’s emerging sexuality had taken place under a barrage of flashlights. Privacy was something only other people had. When she’d proved to be every bit as much of a beauty as her parent, speculation had grown. She’d become as much a target for gossip as her mother. No aspect of her life had been sacred, and when the opposite sex began to take an interest in her the papers had a field-day. Was she, they wondered, the same as her mother?