Curves for the Billionaire (13 page)

“Then one day when I was about twelve, I forgot my Maths homework and rode home at lunch time to get it.  She was there with my uncle Nico—I don’t think you’ve ever met him.  He’s my father’s younger brother and a pilot too.  They were in the kitchen.  She was sitting on the kitchen table and he was standing between her legs.  They were fully dressed—he in his uniform and she in her air hostess uniform again, although she hadn’t returned to work after having Zoë and me—but I had known that they were having sex although he had his back towards me.  He didn’t see me, but she did.”

He took a shuddering breath before controlling himself and Samantha knew that he must have been briefly back in time, reliving the devastating moment.

“I ran back to school as fast as I could, forgetting that I had ridden my bike home and as I was running I remembered her and those two men.  I’d realized that it hadn’t been a dream.  That evening she told me that she and Uncle Nico were hugging because they were fond of each other, but the guys at school and I had already been reading Playboy and Penthouse magazines, so she didn’t fool me.  I didn’t speak to my uncle again until I was nineteen.  I felt so bad for my father and worried that he would come home one day and find her with my uncle or another man.  I worried more that he would get a gun and kill us all and then shoot himself.”

Zachary laughed mirthlessly at his overactive imagination as a child, but Samantha suspected that the fear had been hard for him to live with at the time.

“Now I’m older I’ve accepted that it’s her prerogative to sleep with whoever she wants, but as a mother it was her responsibility to protect her children from seeing things they shouldn’t or being exposed to risk.”

Zoë hadn’t mentioned the fact that Zachary had actually witnessed his mother being unfaithful, but he’d always been protective of his twin and Samantha suspected that he hadn’t told her.  She wondered if it would be prudent to tell him that his sister had confided in her.

“My father’s friends were always coming to our house for dinner and drinks when he wasn’t there.  I just made sure that Zoë kept her door locked and tried to sleep as lightly as possible, just in case.  I was so
glad
when we both got into Oxford and could leave that damn house.”

Samantha breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that he’d finished.  His mother had been careless and indiscreet, but thank God it hadn’t been as bad as she’d imagined.

Her relief was premature.

“I hardly ever came home.  I spent the time developing my software ideas.  One of my lectures, Professor Stein, thought I had a real flair and worked with me during his free time.  Zoë and her friends went to Paris for the summer and I guess I must have been feeling lonely.  It was also going to be my mother’s fortieth birthday the next week.”

Oh God, here it comes!

“I still had my keys and because I rarely came home, they weren’t expecting me.”

The only thing that kept Samantha from hyperventilating was the fact that he said ‘they’.

“My mother was dressed in her uniform again.  She’s always told us that doing just half an hour of yoga every morning has kept her from gaining any weight since we were born.  The men were all wearing pilot uniforms—four of them.  My mother was between two of them—and she was giving another one…head.  I shoved him away and grabbed the man on top of her by his hair and yanked him off.  I was just about to kick the other one when…when the fourth man called my name.”

He stopped and Samantha felt moisture wet her fingers.

“It was Dad.”  His voice was choked.  He coughed to clear his throat and continued, “He had been sitting right there watching them fuck his own wife! 
All
the years I’d worried about him, prayed that he wouldn’t come home unexpectedly and catch her.  I thought that he would be completely devastated, instead all that time she had been fucking other men with
his
permission!”

Realizing she’d been holding her breath, Samantha released it with a gasp.

“I’d taken the late train down, so I couldn’t go back up to Oxford that night.  I bolted up to my room and Dad followed me.  He asked me not to judge her.  She had been sexually abused as a child and though she’d had the best therapist money could pay for, sometimes she needed to feel loved intensely.  The gang…bangs didn’t start after my parents got married—they were happening before that.  Dad said he saw her vulnerability the first time he was invited to join the group.  He took her to dinner the next day and they talked for hours.  He knew exactly who she was when he married her.  He said that it made him
happy
to give her anything she needed to be happy, but he ensured that they treated her with utmost respect.  He actually said that they worshipped my mother like she was a queen.  Complete and utter bullshit!  All the other pilots used her like a whore when they got the urge; my father was a fool to fall in love and marry her!”

“Zac, we can’t decide who we fall in love with,” Samantha gently admonished him.  “I’ve seen your parents together and I’ve always thought that they make a wonderful couple.  Your father always seems so happy. ”

“He’s happy because he thinks he has a diamond,” Zac retorted bitterly.  “I don’t know how he could hold his head up among his colleagues knowing that they’ve probably all…”

“…screwed her,” Samantha finished off under her breath.

His father knowing about the men his wife slept with put a different spin on the situation.  It was unusual, but not as rare as people thought.

 “Zachary.”  She rarely called him by his full name and he glanced up at her in surprise.  “Do you think that your father would be happier without your mother?”

“He would probably lose the will to live,” Zachary admitted.

“Then just be happy for him.  He’s with the person he loves—not everyone in the world is that lucky.  You see your father as a weak person.  Perhaps he’s the opposite.  Perhaps he’s stronger than most men—strong enough to give the woman he loves whatever her heart desires.”

Zachary’s arrested expression told her that he had never considered it from that angle. “He told me that night that many of those men envied him.  My mother has managed to stay young and beautiful while most of their wives have aged and let themselves go.  He said most of them admitted that they wished they had been brave enough to marry her instead of him.  A load of bollocks!”

“Zac, your mother’s stunning.”  The woman was incredibly beautiful and looked about fifteen years younger than Samantha knew she must be—unless she’d given birth to Zachary and his twin when she was about eight years old.  “Perhaps he was telling you the truth.”

“Dad wouldn’t lie to me…but I know he’s lying to himself.  He actually said that she never cheated on him—that he’s given his permission each time she slept with someone else.  He even knew about Uncle Nico—he was the one who had asked my uncle to keep her from being lonely when he was on long-haul flights with stopovers of several nights.”

“But why did she…
entertain
them in the house?”  Samantha had to rack her brains to find a word that was innocuous and yet would convey her meaning.

“Dad said that she needed to feel secure and in control of the situation.  And then said the most ridiculous thing that he said that night—she never slept with other men in their marital bed because she loved and respected him too much!”

“Maybe your mother has a thing for men in pilot uniform and…” Samantha started and then broke off as she remembered a conversation she’d once had with his sister.  A horrible realization started to dawn on her.  “Zoë told me that your grandfather used to be a pilot too.”

“Yes.  He and my grandmother split up when my mother was fourteen.  My grandmother started an affair with a twenty-year-old man and granted my grandfather full custody after the divorce because she didn’t want a daughter who was only six years younger than her new boyfriend around.  My grandfather was the one…”

“You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to,” Samantha told him when he made no attempt to continue.  She needed to know more so that she could understand the situation better and therefore help him more, but these were his family secrets and he had a right to his privacy.

“It’s okay.  I trust you not to tell anyone else.” He took another deep breath and then continued, “Dad said that if her father had been cruel, Mum might have reported him to the authorities.”  Samantha silently registered the fact that he had called his mother “Mum” and not “my mother” for the first time in her hearing for several years.  “Because of him Mum had never had a boyfriend or went to university.  He got her a job as an air hostess after she finished her A-Levels.  When she wasn’t working she just waited around the house until he came home between flights…like some damned housewife!  He died of a heart attack when she was twenty and she fell apart.  She told my father that it was like coping with two deaths at once and yet she couldn’t grieve.  After his death she found herself drinking heavily and sleeping with one pilot after another.  Soon it was two at the same time and then three…  I’m glad that old bastard’s dead because I swear I would have shot him!”

Samantha felt Zachary’s rage building again—his body was like a tightly coiled spring against her.  She held him tighter and said, “Honey, you have to let it go.  You must forgive your mother—she was the innocent victim of an unscrupulous father.”

“I can understand when she was a child and couldn’t fend for herself.”  He gave a sound of disgust.  “But to let it go on when she was a grown woman? 
That
I find hard to accept.”

“She was sexualized at an early age and by someone she loved.  I can’t imagine what that must have been like for her.  When my mother died, I crawled onto my father’s lap and wept like a baby against his shoulder.  I was almost the same height and size as I am now, but he held me and comforted me.”

“I loved the way you were with your father.”  Zachary smiled at her, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“A girl’s father is special to her and your grandfather was unprincipled enough to take advantage of that fact.  Your mother would have had to wrestle with her revulsion of what he was doing to her and the knowledge that he would be jailed if she reported him.  And he probably made her feel guilty about her mother’s betrayal and convinced her it was her duty to take her place.”

“Yes, she told Dad that he had done.  But why would she stay once she’d started working and could get a place of her own?”

“Because by then it had become a habit she couldn’t break.”  Samantha pressed his face closer to her breast for a moment.  “She’s living with the guilt of allowing and possibly enjoying an unnatural relationship.  Don’t add to it.”

“Truthfully, I think I forgave her when my father told me about the sexual abuse—my issue is that she allowed men into the house when she had a vulnerable child…well children really because some men don’t differentiate between the sexes, although he would have had to kill me first!”

Samantha suspected that of all his mother’s transgressions, forgiving her for endangering Zoë was the toughest for Zachary.

“When I asked my father if he didn’t worry about us in the house with strange men when he was not there, he said that they were men he had chosen carefully.  When one of them overstepped his mark, Dad said he beat him almost black and blue.”  Zachary paused for a moment.  “My father is such a strong, tough guy, I can’t understand why he would accept the situation in the first place.”

“You’ve been to a swingers’ club.  Surely you must have seen similar things.”

“I’ve seen worse.  And I know I’m nothing like him.  When Anika invited me to the club I went along to see if it would help me understand how my father…  As soon as I saw those men touch her, I knew that things would never be the same between us.  She was a submissive and after than night I felt the need to punish her.  Our relationship went to dark places I never want to revisit.”

“Then don’t.”  Samantha pulled his head up and kissed him until he relaxed again.  Then she bit his lower lip and asked with a pout, “I guess she was a blonde, too.”

“Yes,” he admitted ruefully.

“So why marry me?” she demanded.  “Because I look nothing like your mother?”

Zachary gave a bark of laughter.