His for the Taking (7 page)

‘Jade, Cindy, this is Nick,’ Zoe said, and watched as her gorgeous sisters beamed all their blonde beauty in Nick’s direction. Nick smiled, obviously dazzled, and held out his hand to them.

‘Nick, these are my sisters,’ Zoe said unhappily, watching him shake hands with each of them in turn. ‘Is Di already here?’

Jade and Cindy were bound to know where their second eldest sister was; the three of them were practically attached by mobile phone.

‘She’s upstairs with Mom and Dad,’ Cindy answered, not tearing her eyes away from Nick’s handsome face.

The elevator dinged. ‘Well, we might as well go up,’ Zoe said. She restrained the urge to put her arm through Nick’s in the sort of possessive gesture she often saw her mom and her two older sisters making with their men. There wasn’t any point. He wasn’t her possession, and he never would be, and Jade and Cindy would never believe her even if she pretended.

When they stepped in the elevator Zoe could see that her sisters were dying to ask all about Nick. They were holding it in well, though. Jade was arranging her pretty face into the sombre expression appropriate for a reading of one’s great-aunt’s will, and Cindy wasn’t about to break etiquette if Jade didn’t first.

‘Poor Aunt Xenia,’ she said instead, softly.

‘I don’t know,’ said Zoe, irritated, because Cindy hadn’t spent more than four hours with Xenia in the past five years, as far as Zoe knew. ‘Getting killed while doing a skateboarding stunt was a pretty classy way to go. I bet she was pleased.’

‘Zoe,’ Jade said, more for form’s sake than because she could ever possibly be shocked by anything that Zoe said.

‘Really,’ Zoe said. ‘I bet she’s up in heaven laughing her ass off. Nick and I were just talking about it, weren’t we Nick?’

She heard the possessiveness in her voice, as blatant as the gesture she’d resisted, and winced.

‘We were, and it does seem like a good way to go,’ Nick said genially, and Zoe was immediately fifty times as irritated because Jade and Cindy didn’t demur against Nick’s comment and it seemed as if she needed him for backup. Which she didn’t.

Zoe made a mental note not to ask Nick anything else. Her family would be all too glad to see her depending on a man.

The elevator dinged and they all went into the plushly carpeted hallway, and down it to the lawyers’ office. Zoe hadn’t been here before, but she guessed if you had to choose a lawyer it made sense to choose one who was rich, because they obviously had to be good at their stuff to earn all that money. Nick opened the glossy door for them as if he’d been opening doors for women all his life—he probably had; he had that whole ‘shining armour and white charger thing’ going on—and Jade and Cindy glided in as if men had been opening doors for them all their lives, which they had, of course. Zoe filed in after them, her hands on her hips.

Her mother and father and other sister Di were all in the waiting room, sitting on leather chairs. They stood when the four of them came in and there was the obligatory hugging session. Zoe suffered it.

‘Oh, Jade, you look stunning,’ her mother said, fingering Jade’s cashmere cardigan, and then turning to Cindy with a smile. ‘And that suit is beautiful, Cynthia. Zoe, it’s so nice to see you in a skirt.’

Zoe caught the subtext.
We expected to see you in ratty old jeans, and that skirt isn’t much better.

‘Bought it at a yard sale,’ she said. ‘Three bucks. Are we ready to go in and hear this will thing?’

‘Who’s your friend, Cindy?’ Michael Drake asked his youngest daughter.

His smile was indulgent. Zoe had no doubt that her parents spent many a pleasurable evening discussing their youngest daughter’s bevy of beaus. They’d done the same thing about Jade and Di, while Zoe had been still living at home and her two older sisters had still been unmarried.

The only beau Zoe had ever brought home had been one of the guys who hung around near the railway tracks racing dirt bikes when she was about fifteen. Her parents had talked about him, all right.

Cindy was attractively confused at her father’s mistake. ‘Oh, Dad, I don’t—’

‘Mr Drake, Mrs Drake,’ Nick said, stepping forward and extending his hand to Zoe’s parents, ‘I’m Nicholas Giroux. Zoe brought me here to see if there was anything relevant to my family in Ms Drake’s will.’

‘Zoe?’ He concealed it well, but Zoe saw that, while her father had looked indulgent talking to Cindy, he looked wary talking to her. ‘You think your aunt Xenia had something to do with this young man’s family?’

‘Let’s face it, none of us had the slightest idea what she was up to,’ Zoe said with as much cheerfulness as she could muster. ‘There’s some evidence she might have known Nick’s dad. Nick’s been staying with me in Xenia’s apartment,’ she added, and was rewarded by the surprised expressions on all of her family’s faces.

At that moment the big wooden door on the side wall opened and a tubby man in a very expensive-looking suit came out. ‘Mr and Mrs Drake, Jade, Diana, Zoe, Cynthia? Would you care to come in?’

Mr Feinberg shook each of their hands, including Nick’s, as they came into his panelled office. He’d set up enough upholstered chairs for them all to be able to have a seat with a couple left over. The lawyer seemed nervous for some reason.

‘I’ve copied the will for each of you,’ he said, shifting from side to side on his tiny feet as he gave each of them a slim folder. ‘It’s not very complicated, it can be summed up quite quickly, and it will have to go through probate of course, especially with such a sizeable estate as Ms Drake’s, but I feel her wishes are very clear.’

He took a seat behind his great glossy desk and cleared his throat. ‘So, if you open your folders…’

Obediently, Zoe’s family opened the cardboard folders. Zoe stared at the cover of hers. It was blue. Besides the funeral plan, it was the last message her great-aunt had left for her.

She wasn’t in a hurry to read it.

Beside her, she heard Nick draw in a sharp breath. When she looked over she saw he’d opened his folder to the last page.

He held it out so she could see it, and pointed to the date on the bottom, underneath Xenia’s bold black signature. ‘April twenty-third,’ he said.

‘So?’

That wasn’t long ago. It was unsettling to think that her great-aunt might have had a premonition of her own mortality just a few days before she’d bailed on her board.

‘That’s the same day my father’s letter was postmarked.’

Zoe met Nick’s dark eyes with her own.

‘So,’ said Mr Feinberg, clearing his throat, ‘as I said, Ms Drake’s wishes are clear. You can skip the legal language, and turn to page two, where Ms Drake bequeaths the sum of ten thousand dollars to her nephew Michael Drake, and stipulates that additional sums of ten thousand dollars to be invested in bonds for each of her four great-great nieces and nephews already born, with directions for an additional fifty thousand dollars to be set aside for children not yet born, to be held until their eighteenth birthdays when the monies may be used for college tuition or whatever other purpose the recipient desires.’

Jade and Di murmured to each other. Zoe, cynically, knew what they were talking about. Ten thousand dollars a kid wasn’t bad, plus money for kids who hadn’t been born, but to Xenia a hundred thousand dollars couldn’t be more than a token amount. All of Xenia’s living relatives were here in this room, and none of them except for Zoe’s dad had received anything directly.

Zoe smiled. She just bet that Xenia had written her will in the way that would pique her relatives the most. Xenia had never shown any signs of wanting to please the rest of the Drake family, and Zoe was glad she was carrying it on in her will, too.

‘If you turn to page three,’ Mr Feinberg said, ‘you’ll see the main part of the will, where Ms Drake bequeaths all her remaining property, money, and concerns to her great-niece Zoe Drake.’

Zoe’s head snapped up. She stared at the lawyer.

He cleared his throat again. ‘It’s quite a substantial estate, Ms Drake. You’re named as the executor, as well, so we will need to go through the particulars together, and of course there’s probate to consider, but with property and investments and income it’s worth in the region of fifty million dollars.’

Zoe thought her family was probably talking, but she couldn’t hear anything because as soon as the lawyer’s words registered in her brain her ears filled with a rushing sound. Her entire body felt cold and hot at the same time. She stood and walked out of the office and through the waiting room.

The stairs were at the end of the corridor. She pushed open the fire door and into the concrete stairwell, taking the steps down two at a time. She watched her feet in her running shoes hitting each step precisely in the middle and concentrated on her knees flexing, her thigh muscles stretching and contracting. The metal railing was cold underneath her hand.

The office was on the twelfth floor. By the time Zoe got to the bottom of the staircase her legs were burning but her breath was still coming steady. She slammed the door open, strode across the lobby, and out into the street.

She wanted to sweat, to breathe hard, to feel right in her working body. She broke into a run as soon as she hit the sidewalk, doing her best to ignore how her skirt got in the way.

Two blocks down she felt a hand land on her shoulder. Zoe spun, her breathing finally sharp, her hands whipping up to defend herself.

It was Nick.

‘Zoe, are you all right?’

She saw his dark eyes frowning and full of concern, his hair in disarray from running. She noticed she still clutched the blue folder containing Xenia’s will in her right hand.

‘Me?’ she said. ‘I’m just dandy. Didn’t you hear the man? I’m a millionaire.’

She burst into tears.

CHAPTER FIVE

N
ICK PUT HIS
arm around Zoe’s shoulders and steered her across the busy street and into Central Park. Maybe she could carry on a conversation in the middle of a sidewalk, but he couldn’t.

He was looking at the traffic and then looking for somewhere to sit down, but he could feel her body trembling under his arm. She didn’t make a single sound, not a sniff or a whimper. Just these silent sobs shaking her body. Nick found a patch of grass under a tree, as isolated as they were going to get, and gently sat her down.

She looked straight ahead, not at him, still crying. He’d seen plenty of women crying in his life and Zoe wasn’t like any of them. She didn’t screw up her face or hitch in hysterical breaths. Her generous mouth was turned down at the corners in unhappiness, and fat tears gathered in her eyes, spilled over, and rolled down her cheeks, leaving wet trails on her skin. The tears made her eyes look bigger and bluer. They clumped her eyelashes together, darkening them.

He reached over and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her skin was much softer than he’d expected.

‘It was a surprise, huh?’ he said.

‘That’s an understatement.’ Her voice was even lower and huskier than usual. She swiped at her eyes, but the tears kept coming.

Nick’s arm was still around her; he pulled her a little closer, as if he could protect her from her hurt with his body. She wasn’t exactly pliant in his arms, but he could feel both the strength of her body and the soft pressure of her breast against his side.

‘I’m sorry you lost your great-aunt,’ he said.

‘Why’d she leave her money to me?’ She turned her head to look him in the face.

‘Who else was she going to leave it to? You said she wasn’t close to the rest of your family.’

‘But why me? I barely knew her, too. She never even told me what she did for a living.’ She wiped her eyes again, smearing moisture over her cheeks and clumping her eyelashes. It wasn’t a delicate gesture, but it was a vulnerable one.

‘It doesn’t sound like she’d told anybody.’

‘It’s a lot of money, Nick. Really a lot. Why me?’

Nick tucked a strand of her hair back behind her ear. Her hair was silky and nearly as warm as her skin. ‘Because she trusted you.’

‘But
why?
’ It came out as a wail, and Zoe bent her body to hide her face between her drawn-up knees. Her shoulders shook.

Nick stroked her back as she cried. She was wearing her horrible big leather jacket again but he could feel the shape of her back and shoulders through it. He remembered the sight of her next to her three sisters and her mother; all of the other female Drakes had been petite and narrow-shouldered. Zoe, with her straight posture and her determined stance, had seemed sturdy and more real. But under his hand now she felt fragile and feminine, maybe because she was crying.

He remembered how she’d stared at him this morning when he’d told her he trusted her not to lock him out of the house while he got breakfast. It was if he’d told her he had scientific evidence that the moon was made out of Alka-Seltzer. He was a relative stranger; he could understand why she’d be suspicious of his motives. It was harder to understand why she wouldn’t accept that her great-aunt had faith in her.

Then again, he remembered how Zoe’s mother had made the comment about her skirt, as if she were surprised that Zoe had made any effort with her clothing at all.

Maybe it wasn’t so hard to figure out why Zoe didn’t believe her relatives would trust her.

Her hair was tousled on the back of her head. He ran his fingers through it to straighten it, and again was surprised by how silky it was. In the sun shining through the leaves it was golden. He twisted a strand of it around his finger, interested in how it reflected the light and caressed his skin.

‘Sometimes we just trust people,’ he said to her, though he wasn’t sure she was listening. ‘Your great-aunt must have thought you were the person who deserved what she had. From the way you defended her personal things from me this morning, I’d say she was right.’

Zoe drew in a sharp breath and straightened, pulling away from him. She shook her head and rubbed her hands hard over her face.

‘I don’t believe I’m crying in front of you,’ she said, her voice full of disgust.

‘It’s okay. I’m good with crying women. My sister used to spend a lot of time crying when we were growing up.’