Rich: Benson Security 5 Read online

  Rich

  Benson Security 5

  Janet Elizabeth Henderson

  Copyright © 2020 by janet Elizabeth Henderson

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  ISBN:978-0-473-51645-1

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is dedicated to all the women who have suffered rape or any kind of sexual assault. Remember the shame lies with the perpetrator, not with you. You are a survivor. You are strong. And you are perfect, just as you are. You hold no blame in what happened to you.

  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue 1

  Epilogue 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Janet Elizabeth Henderson

  Prologue

  Ten Years Earlier

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to call your family?” the nurse said. “Or maybe a friend?”

  The woman’s voice was an echo inside Rachel Ford-Talbot’s head, making the dizziness she felt so much worse. Picking a point high on the wall above the window, she concentrated on it until the room stopped spinning. How long it took, she didn’t know. Time was distorted, and a strange sense of disorientation clung to everything she did.

  She tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry. The nurse murmured something before she felt a plastic beaker being gently held to her parched lips. Water. Lukewarm and tasting slightly chemical.

  A sharp, stabbing pain shot down her throat with each sip before she sagged deeper into the bed. “Don’t call anyone.” Her voice was a croak. “I don’t want anyone.”

  “You need someone.” The woman’s voice overflowed with compassion. “If you were my daughter, I’d hate to think you were going through this alone.”

  “Please.” Rachel couldn’t bear to look at her and see pity. Not again. Never again. It was all she’d seen since arriving at the hospital. Instead, she focused on that same spot high on the wall. Was it a scuff mark? A cobweb? A shadow that was nothing at all? “Please, don’t call anyone.”

  As soon as she’d woken up on the floor of a hotel room she didn’t recognize, with several Polaroid photos beside her, she’d known she couldn’t tell anyone what happened. She’d understood the warning in the photos without even reading the threats scrawled across them.

  “The police are here,” the doctor said as she came into the room.

  “I don’t want to talk to them.”

  All Rachel wanted to do was sleep. Possibly forever. Her limbs were leaden, sinking into the stiff mattress on the hospital bed. Her head throbbed—an aftereffect of the drug that had been slipped into her drink in the nightclub. Her throat ached from the finger marks around her neck. There were bruises and scrapes all over her body. Some in places she couldn’t bear thinking about. Not yet anyway.

  Maybe never.

  She felt a touch on her hand and jerked it away, hugging her arms tight to her body as she concentrated on the mark on the wall. Was it getting bigger? Was the blackness growing?

  “It’s okay, honey,” the nurse said softly. “You’re safe here.”

  “Rachel”—the doctor walked around the bed and stood between her and the smudge that kept her grounded—“the police are here to help. They can find the people who did this to you.”

  Rachel winced. People. Not person.

  “I can’t tell them anything. I have no memory of what happened, and no evidence.” She’d ripped the photos into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hotel toilet, along with the contents of her stomach. Not that there had been anything in the images that would help identify her attackers. The only face that could be seen was hers.

  “Let us do a forensic examination,” the doctor said gently. “Let us collect evidence. It may help the police find who did this.”

  She shook her head, and nausea assaulted her. The bile surged up into her mouth before she could even attempt to stop it. Hands helped her to sit up. A basin appeared under her nose, and the two women waited while she tried to empty a stomach that had nothing left in it.

  They eased her back down onto the bed, and the nurse wiped her face with a cold cloth before letting her sip some more water. This time, it tasted of vomit.

  “I don’t want to file a report,” Rachel said when she’d had enough to drink. “Tell the police to go away.”

  She stared at the spot. It was definitely getting bigger. Darker. Blacker.

  “Okay,” the doctor said slowly. “We’ll let you rest, and we’ll talk about this again in a little while. You might change your mind.”

  The nurse and doctor spoke to each other, but Rachel wasn’t listening. There would be no changing her mind. The note on one of the photos had made sure of that, as it told her that the drug used to spike her drink had come from her family’s pharmaceutical company. Her family business had played an unwitting part in her attack.

  It was just the kind of scandal the newspapers loved. The company name, her family’s name, would be dragged through the mud. People would question what kind of security was in place at TayFor that allowed drugs to be stolen from the research labs and used in this way. It would never end. Not until all the good her family had achieved was trampled into the dirt, and her parents’ life work was gone. No, she couldn’t tell anyone about the attack.

  Even if it meant giving up everything she’d ever wanted.

  “If you need anything, just buzz,” the nurse told her. “I’ll be right here. But please, honey, think about talking to the police. Nobody should get away with what happened to you.”

  Rachel didn’t reply. She just stared up at the mark on the wall as the lights dimmed and the door closed softly. All that was left to keep her company was the beeping machines, that sterile hospital smell, and the dark, spreading smudge.

  And while Rachel stared at it, she fought through the haze clouding her brain, attempting to figure out what she was going to do with her life now. She was due back in Glasgow soon, to begin her final year at university. She’d always planned to return to her family business once she graduated. Her mind had been set on becoming CEO from the moment she’d realized what those letters meant.

  That wouldn’t happen now.

  But there was something she could do. Her friend, Harry Boyle, was a programming genius, poised to start his own company and clueless about how to go about it. She would help him. And she’d tell her parents that being away from home had changed her goals. She no longer felt her future lay with TayFor Pharmaceuticals.

  And that was the truth.

  Because the me
ssage spread across the photos of her rape had stated that if she were to return to the company as planned, details of the worst night of her life would be made public. The press would receive copies of the photos, along with proof that the drug used to spike her drink came from her family’s very own labs.

  It would ruin them.

  It would ruin her.

  The inky darkness that had started as a minuscule spot high on the wall grew large enough to fill the room. It engulfed Rachel. Seeping into her pores. Settling in her DNA. Changing her forever as it made itself at home deep within her.

  And as she fell asleep, she thought it only right. The darkness could live in the place that once held hope. The place that was now empty.

  Chapter One

  Benson Security, London Office, Present Day

  * * *

  Rachel Ford-Talbot should never have allowed her father to hire her company. There were plenty of other security experts in London who could have worked with him just as easily. But no, she’d let sentimentality get the better of her, just because he’d had one teeny, tiny heart attack, and now she was the one suffering. If that wasn’t a lesson in why you shouldn’t help people, she didn’t know what was.

  “I don’t see why I have to get involved in the investigation,” she told Callum McKay, one of her business partners.

  As usual, the Scotsman was in a bad mood. One that’d started the day he was retired from the SAS after losing both legs to a bomb in Afghanistan. Even though he had state-of-the-art prosthetics now, he was still permanently grumpy—unless you were his wife or his children. For them, he tried to act human.

  “Because,” he said through a jaw clenched so hard it was a wonder he could talk at all, “you’re familiar with your family’s pharmaceutical company, and you’re the one who can get us close to the family members on the board.” He folded his arms over one of his many gray Henleys and glared at her.

  Like that would have any impact. Honestly. Didn’t he know her?

  “You have a professional spy leading the investigation.” Rachel waved a hand in the general direction of Michael Carter, whom everyone called Harvard. She had no idea why, since he’d studied at MIT. Sometimes it was as though everyone she worked with was still in middle school. Shouldn’t nicknames be banned as soon as you hit your twenties? Wasn’t there a law making it so? “Surely a former CIA agent can take care of this investigation on his own. After all, it isn’t like he has to infiltrate Al-Qaeda; we’re talking about a pharmaceutical company in Surrey. Compared to investigating ISIS, getting to the bottom of some industrial espionage should be a walk in the park.”

  On the other side of the conference table, Harvard sat back in his chair, relaxed and smiling. Those dark eyes sparkling at her in challenge. Something he’d been doing ever since joining Benson Security months earlier. It was as though he knew a secret, a sexy secret, that he was willing to share with her if she’d just take a step toward him. Which was not going to happen. She didn’t do relationships. And she definitely had no intention of entering into a casual arrangement with a colleague. No matter how much he tempted her.

  “Rachel,” her father said with long suffering, “you know as well as anyone that Harvard can’t get close to the family without help.”

  “Then you help him. You know the company and the family members on the board even better than I do.”

  The vein throbbing at his temple brought back many childhood memories. Apparently, that particular vein hadn’t even been there before Rachel was born, and she was the only one out of her siblings to cause it to throb.

  “How exactly can I help him?” His tone was clipped. “Should I tell everyone he’s my long-lost son?”

  Rachel cocked her head as she considered the idea.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Callum snapped. “Nobody would buy it.”

  “Because Harvard’s African-American?” Rachel prodded her partner, as making him snap was too much fun to resist. “How very narrow-minded of you. Father could just as easily have had an illicit affair with a black woman as a white woman.”

  “I haven’t had any affairs,” her father barked.

  She gave him what she hoped was a sweet smile. “As you keep telling me, this situation isn’t real. We’re pretending, and it’s only for the duration of the investigation. If I can pretend I’m engaged to my bodyguard, surely you can pretend you have an illegitimate son.”

  “And have my reputation ruined in the meantime? Do you seriously want your mother to have to deal with that kind of gossip? Stop being so difficult. We both know you wouldn’t let her suffer like that any more than I would.”

  Roger Ford-Talbot pushed back his chair and started pacing the length of Benson Security’s conference room. Pacing was something else he seemed to do more often around her than her brothers.

  “Rachel,” Callum rumbled, “just suck it up and do the bloody job. You’re best suited to it, and you know it. How hard can it be to pretend you’re engaged to Harvard? You hardly take your eyes off each other anyway.”

  Harvard cocked an eyebrow at her in challenge. Daring her to deny Callum’s claim. Like she cared one way or another what any of them thought.

  She absently tapped her red nails against her iPhone screen. “My strengths lie in business management, not in espionage. Or even in any type of fieldwork. And goodness knows I’ve been in enough field situations to know I’m not suited to it. I don’t see why we can’t just give the job you want to give me to Harvard. As director of special projects, he’d have no problem getting close to the family members employed at TayFor.”

  “Because,” her father said as he paced, “the company would never appoint someone to a role like that without them going through the interview process, and that involves the whole board. There would be no way to guarantee he got the job, and even if he did get it, it would take months to put him in place within the company. Months where this thief is free to steal whatever they like from us. Whereas you’re a family member and a shareholder, so you could take up the position without delay or any argument from the board.”

  Which reminded her—she was still angry about that little deception too. “When I turned thirty, I told you I didn’t want my shares in the company. I told you to get rid of them.”

  “And I assumed you were making an emotional and irrational decision that you would regret later, so I kept them for you.”

  Callum snorted. “Aye, the first thing anybody thinks when they meet Rachel is that she’s emotional and irrational. Listening to you talk, I wonder if we know the same person.”

  Her father ran a hand through his pristinely coiffured silver hair. “Regardless of everyone’s perception of my daughter, it’s a good job I kept hold of her shares in TayFor. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any way to get your team in place to investigate the family.” His head fell forward and he shook it. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. I can’t believe that someone I trust is stealing from us.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Really? You can’t believe it? Uncle Theo’s on marriage number five, while the payments for his first four marriages are crippling him financially. Not to mention, we have no idea what connections the new wife brought into the family. I believe he picked this one up in a strip club. Cousin Rupert has a well-known gambling problem—the problem being he never wins. Aunt Clarissa has been in rehab three times. And when she relapses, she’d sell a kidney to get a fix, so it isn’t a stretch to believe she’d sell company secrets instead. And that’s only scraping the surface. Who knows what everyone else is doing behind closed doors? Although I’m sure that information will be fascinating once our tech team digs it up. You may as well face facts; we’re a family of criminals. We just do it wearing Prada.”

  To emphasize her point, she brushed some imaginary lint from her black Prada pantsuit.

  “Do you really have to be so facetious, Rachel?” Her father dropped back into his seat, looking frustrated. “This is serious. Someone almost stole the det
ails of our flagship drug. We’ve invested ten years in research and development for that drug, and if there hadn’t been a glitch in the system, the information would have made it into the hands of our competitors. If anyone had put it into production before us, it would have meant millions of pounds down the drain. Who knows what our spy has already sold or is planning to sell now? All I know is that if we don’t stop them fast, it will be the end of the company. Is it too much to ask that you sacrifice a few weeks of your life to help prevent that?”

  “Is it necessary to be so dramatic?” she asked him.

  “Apparently it is, because you aren’t taking this seriously.”

  “Oh, I’m taking it very seriously. I just don’t think I’m the best person for the job.”

  “You’re the only person for the job.” Callum thumped a fist on the table. “Stop being such a whiny wee wean.”

  Rachel gave him an icy stare. “If you’re going to insult me, could you at least do it in English?”

  He made a growling sound that was neither Scottish nor English.

  Harvard shifted in his seat, drawing all eyes to him. The seams of his blazer strained against his shoulder muscles as he sat up straight. She couldn’t help but appreciate the cut of his jacket and matching black shirt. They’d obviously been tailored to fit his larger-than-average frame to perfection.