A Little Revenge Omnibus Read Free Page A

right, Kelly had to acknowledge.
    ‘Besides, if my plan works successfully, and it will, then he’ll drop his current victim just as swiftly as he dropped Beth, and for very much the same reason.’
    ‘Your plan? What plan?’ Kelly asked her uneasily.
    ‘This plan. Listen,’ Dee commanded. ‘We are going to mount a two-pronged attack against Julian where he’s most vulnerable.
    ‘I happen to know that one of Julian’s clever little ways of funding his expensive lifestyle is to persuade gullible people to invest in his apparently initially sound financial schemes. By the time they realise that they are anything but sound, it’s too late and their money has gone.’
    ‘But surely that’s fraud?’ Kelly protested. Dee shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘Technically, yes, but Julian relies on the fact that his victims feel too embarrassed or are too timid to complain. For that reason he tends to prey on the elderly and the vulnerable, the innocently naive, too trusting and honest themselves to see what he really is until it’s too late.’
    ‘The man’s a menace,’ Kelly complained sharply.
    ‘Yes, he is, and we’re going to expose him as he fully deserves to be exposed,’ Dee told her. ‘You, Kelly, are suddenly going to become an extremely rich young woman. You have a great-uncle, previously unknown and now deceased, who has left you a considerable amount of money. This inheritance isn’t something you yourself have made public, of course; in fact you refuse to talk about it—its existence is something you wish to keep a secret—but its existence has subtly filtered through the town’s grapevine, at least as far as Julian’s ears.
    ‘We already know that he finds you attractive; you’ve told us both that he made advances to you whilst he was pretending to Beth that he loved her... All you have to do is let him believe that you’re prepared to commit yourself, and, more importantly, your future to him. His own ego and greed will do the rest.’
    ‘But I can’t pretend that I’ve inherited money...I can’t lie about something like that,’ Kelly said. ‘What will people think when they know?’
    ‘Only Julian will ever know about your supposed inheritance,’ Dee assured her. ‘Just as only Julian will ever know that you are a wealthy widow and have money to spare for investment,’ she told Anna.
    Anna looked at her uncertainly.
    ‘He has already tried to borrow money from me, Dee, it’s true, as I’ve just told you both, but I’m certainly not a wealthy woman and...’
    ‘Look, when it comes to convincing Julian that you both have financial assets that we all know simply don’t exist, you can leave everything to me. I promise you that Julian is the only person who will be made aware of these imaginary fortunes.’
    ‘But will he believe it? Surely he’ll...’
    ‘He’ll believe it,’ Dee assured Kelly. ‘He’ll believe it because he’ll want to believe it. He needs to believe it,’ she told them grimly. ‘From what I’ve learned, his own financial position is so perilous at the moment that he’ll grasp just about any straw he can to save himself.
    ‘Once he switches his allegiance from his current girlfriend to you, Kelly, and once he tries to draw you, Anna, into one of his financial scams, we’ll be able to publicly reveal him for the cheat and liar that he genuinely is...’
    ‘It sounds plausible,’ Kelly acknowledged. ‘And it would certainly exonerate Beth if we could pull it off.’
    ‘As well as preventing his current girlfriend from suffering a potential broken heart and losing her inheritance,’ Anna supplied protectively.
    ‘So it’s agreed,’ Dee slipped in quickly. ‘We don’t have any option but to go ahead and bring him to book.’
    ‘No, I suppose we don’t,’ Kelly acknowledged.
    She still wasn’t totally convinced that she was going to be able to carry off the role Dee had apparently cast for her as a wealthy heiress, but her head felt too muzzy for