Pride After Her Fall (15 page)

He got up and walked out into the empty carpeted corridor.

‘Mike,’ he said with deceptive casualness to his genius PA, ‘I’ve got a few leads I need chased up.’ He asked for all the pertinent information about Raymond St James’s trial and his creditors.

John Cullinan stepped into the hall. ‘Nash, man, are you in this or not?’

‘Yeah.’ Nash pocketed his cell. He’d done all he could for the moment. ‘I’m in.’

* * *

Sitting on the little red couch in a twin room at the Hotel de Paris, Lorelei shook her head over the paperwork the bank had given her.

‘So let me get this straight,’ said Simone, mixing coffee. ‘He’s opened up negotiations with the bank for you, covered your outstanding mortgage payments and is acting as guarantor for the next six months?’

‘
Oui,
it appears so.’

‘Is that legal?’

‘If I give the bank my signature.’

Simone stopped stirring. ‘If?
If?
’

‘I can’t accept this, Simone. Not now.’

‘You’re going to accept it,
chère,
if I have to tie you up and carry you down there myself. He must be feeling a cartload of guilt to be doing this.’

‘
Non,
it’s just Nash—the way he is.’ Generous. Always so generous with his time and his money...and his brother. He’d given up everything for a year for his brother. He’d given up his racing career for his brother.

He deserved to have another chance.

Lorelei found her breathing had become scratchy.

Like Simone. Who had flown down immediately from Paris, leaving her children with her husband and taking a leave of absence from her high-powered job. To make coffee, offer a kind shoulder and listen.

You did those things for the people you loved.

But he didn’t love her or he wouldn’t have let her go.

Simone came and set a mug down in front of her.

‘He’s racing tomorrow in Lyon. We could go. You could speak to him about this.’

Lorelei shook her head vigorously.

Simone gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Do you know what I think,
chère?
This man loves you. He’s just having a few problems working out how to show it.’

‘Don’t, Simone. You have no idea how many times I heard all my stepmothers and their girlfriends talking like this.
He’s this way because he’s a man. He’s this way because you make him like this.
In the end he’s this way because it’s who he is. It’s who he wants to be. Nash wants to race cars, he wants to win and he puts work above everything.’

Lorelei released a huge sob of a breath.

‘All my life that’s how it’s been.
Papa
put his women ahead of me.
Grandmaman
put the charity ahead of me. I’m not mooning over a man who thinks oil and grease and speed outweigh my love.’

‘You’re in love with him.’ Simone sat down beside her.

‘That’s what you got out of my little speech?’

Simone shook her head with a smile. ‘Isn’t it all that matters in the end,
cherie?
’

* * *

Was
it all that mattered?

Lorelei lay awake, staring out at the night.

Her father would say,
Oui, but of course. L’amour is everything.

But Raymond had never really loved anybody in his life but himself, with a little corner of his heart reserved for her.

She deserved so much more. Everyone deserved to be loved wholeheartedly and for themselves. A sob made its way up through her body, leaving her shaken, but still she couldn’t cry.

She loved Nash, really loved him, but she felt battered. He had left her behind, he didn’t love her back, and here she was—so very, very dependent on him.

Except for one thing.

The villa.

He could have gifted it to her. The meaningless gesture of an excessively wealthy man. He hadn’t. He had chosen instead to take the pressure off her with the gift of time. Time to think. Time to make a decision about what she really wanted to do. It also enabled her to envisage a time when she could pay him back.

He knew her well enough to know it was the only gift she wouldn’t throw back in his face.

Lorelei rolled onto her back.

Mon Dieu,
he hadn’t made her dependent. He had made her strong again.

In every way.

Lorelei bolted up in bed.

She flung open the other bedroom door and the little bedside light flickered on as Simone sat up groggily.

‘How long will it take me to drive to Lyon?’

‘Three hours, give or take.’ Simone yawned. ‘Why?’

Lorelei bit her lip. ‘I’m going to do what I should have done on that plane. Fight for him.’

Simone gave her a wavery smile. ‘Should I expect to see you on the news tomorrow night, throwing punches at track girls?’

It was a gentle reminder not to overreact.

Except what had Nash told her? Not to be sorry, never to be sorry.

‘It’s always a possibility.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I
T
WAS
race day.

Nash continued to scan the documents emailed to his smartphone. Raymond St James had quite a list of creditors.

Lifting his eyes from the bright screen, for a moment all Nash could see was Lorelei, locked out of her beloved home, trying desperately to steer him away, to hide the truth of her situation, only admitting, when forced, ‘I have had some debts.’

Some debts.

‘Nash, man, you’re cutting it fine.’

He dumped the phone and dragged up the zipper on his fire-retardant suit, pulled the face mask on and reached for his helmet.

The sound of the crowd, the smell of gasoline fumes, the whir of his car being readied usually pushed up his adrenaline levels. But this afternoon he didn’t need any help with that.

His heart was pounding, he was sweating inside the hot suit, but he knew how to switch off and do his job.

He’d raced all over the globe for a decade.

He’d won; he’d lost. Mostly he’d won.

He usually knew the outcome before he got in the car. He studied the field, he knew his car and he applied logic and ability and allowed for that two per cent of unpredictability that lay in any race.

It was that two per cent that was on his mind—and it had nothing to do with the race.

* * *

As he ripped across the finish line outside Lyon the fact that he took little pleasure in the win didn’t detract from the roar of the crowd. Slinging himself out of the car, he embraced Alain Demarche and Antonio Abruzzi in turn. Shook hands with a couple of guys from the pit crew and mounted the podium.

He was stepping off amidst champagne and track girls when he saw her.

She was standing with Nicolette Delarosa. She was wearing blue jeans and a simple green shirt and her hair was a halo around her piquant face. But, most tellingly, a lanyard dangled around her neck.

He focused on the lanyard, knowing then that this wasn’t some fantasy apparition. She was real. Heart thumping, he moved away from the podium but the crowd had already swallowed her up.

He shouldered his way through and grabbed one of the security guards forming a phalanx around him.

‘There’ll be a ’55 Sunbeam Alpine in the VIP car park. Can you hold on to it until I get out?’

‘Sure thing.’

‘The woman who owns it will kick up a fuss. Make sure she’s treated with respect.’

‘Absolutely. Great race, man.’

‘Thanks.’

Let her be there.
If she wasn’t he’d grab a car and drive every mile back to Monaco and fetch her.

He hadn’t wanted to race today. All he had wanted to do was go and fetch her back. But he had a job to do. A lot of people were relying on him—as always. You couldn’t escape responsibility for others. Lorelei had never tried. Her compassionate humanity humbled him.

She had hidden so much behind those charming mannerisms. What he had read as light-heartedness and frivolity were her coping mechanisms. He’d got it all wrong.

How in the hell had he got it so wrong?

In the bungalow the night he’d confronted her about hiding things she’d accused him of not knowing her at all, of not trying to know her.

She’d been right.

He hadn’t wanted to look at what was shouting in his face. He’d been so damned determined to keep to his single-minded plan to race that he’d been willing to sacrifice this extraordinary chance he’d been given to love and be loved to his own selfish need to prove himself. To prove his old man was wrong. He wasn’t weak, a snivelling kid who drove people away with his demands for love and attention, the innocent child who had reached instinctively for love and been denied it. So he’d learned to deride his own needs, and when Lorelei had come along, he hadn’t had a clue how to even
begin
loving her.

Yet he did. Her compassion and her humanity had torn into those barriers he’d raised, yet still he’d gone back for more.

It had always been there when they made love, from the very first night, and he’d seen it when she danced on the beach—the acceptance in her body of who she was.

Her acceptance of
him.

Come be with me. Let me show you how to love me, how to love yourself.

He closed his eyes, took a deep, sustaining breath, and knew his life had just taken a sudden irrevocable turn. For the better.

* * *

He was in his civvies and to his surprise Lorelei was just sitting on the bonnet of her car. Not kicking, not scratching, not a thrown shoe in sight. She was chatting casually with three security guys, who stood around looking more interested in making an impression than doing their job.

The guys evaporated with polite nods as Nash approached. Lorelei leaned back, angling her body at him. The old playful pose dragged him back to the first time he’d met her, when she’d put on that little show and he’d lost his head over her.

‘I thought I dreamed you up,’ he said, his voice suddenly rather hoarse.

‘Are you in the habit of doing that?’

‘Lately? Yeah. All the time.’

She slid off the bonnet of the car and stood before him, suddenly not so sure of herself, her face solemn.

‘I’m not Jack,’ she said.

He went still.

‘And I’m grateful for the time with the villa, but I’m not your rescue package, Nash Blue.’

He bowed his head.

‘I know that, Lorelei,’ he said in a thickened voice. ‘I saw you at the equestrian centre. The day we got back I followed you.’

‘You followed me? I didn’t see you.’

‘You were training a young girl with a prosthesis. I had no idea.’ He stepped towards her, aching to take her in his arms. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Lorelei hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I could say it was because it didn’t come up, but the truth is...’ Her voice died away. She shook her head. ‘I’m not proud of it, but I wanted to hold something back from you because I sensed you were holding so much back from me.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Fair enough. But you have to know when I got the big picture everything I’d told myself about my feelings for you came crashing down. I didn’t want to love you, Lorelei, and so I told myself you could never be anything but another person I’d have to bail out.’

‘In the end you did,’ she said in a strangled voice.

‘No.’ He shook his head with a soft smile. ‘I gave myself time.’

‘You gave
me
time,’ she corrected.

His smile grew. ‘Oh, sweetheart, you’re no rescue package. I did it for both of us.’

Lorelei stood there for a timeless moment.

‘Then why couldn’t you love me?’

It was a plea from her heart.

‘God, Lorelei.’ It was wrenched from him. ‘I was afraid I’d love you too much.’

Time stood still.

‘I was a clingy kid,’ he said, almost tonelessly. ‘Dad had a stream of women in the early days, and whichever woman picked me up she’d be mum. But they’d always leave. Dad would drive them away with his drinking.’

Lorelei didn’t shift an inch, afraid if she did he would stop. She so desperately wanted to hear it all, even as her mind turned in horror from the picture he was painting.

‘The old man used to say they left because of me.’ He shook his head at her expression. ‘It’s bull, I know. But when you’re a kid you believe your dad.’

‘Nash—’ She reached up and stroked his face, unable not to touch him.

‘When I went back to Sydney and saw the shape Jack was in his ex-wife said the same thing.
He’s this way because of you.
And in a way she was right. I succeeded. I got the career, the money, the accolades. Jack couldn’t cope.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘I looked at you, Lorelei, and all I saw was a fragile girl who’d run up debts and was living like there was no tomorrow.’

‘C’est vrai,’
she said softly. It was true. She had been.

‘I knew you’d been through the wringer with that trial and all the nasty publicity, and I thought if I put you in the public eye it would be as if I’d turned a hunter’s spotlight on you. All the stuff about your father would come out. For all those reasons I couldn’t do it to you. I thought I’d break you. Just like I broke Jack.’

Lorelei shook her head.

‘Then I saw you at the equestrian centre and I knew I’d got it wrong.’

She waited.

‘All my life people have put my success down to natural gifts, and, yeah, I’ve got some talent. But I’ve worked damn hard to get where I am. When you told me about your accident I knew we were alike. I understood you’d worked hard at your sport. I assumed you’d given it up. But when I saw you’d turned your dream into something better—something outward, for other people—I recognised what I already knew. You’re a special woman, Lorelei St James. Then I did some phoning around. Why in the hell didn’t you tell me those debts were your father’s legal fees?’

Lorelei swallowed. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I was ashamed.’

‘You should be bloody proud. Your father is a lucky man. I kept telling myself you were like Jack—I’d overwhelm you, wreck your life—but the truth is you’re strong. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. Stronger than me. You overwhelm me.’

Stunned by this outpouring, Lorelei didn’t know what to say. Nash, who never said more than he had to, hadn’t stopped talking, and he was calling her special and strong and all the things she’d always wanted to be to someone but somehow never had been.

But all of this praise, all of this putting her on a pedestal, frightened her.

‘Please don’t turn me into a trophy. I’m flesh and blood—prone to mistakes, to overreacting...’

‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously, taking hold of her. ‘No, I’ve never seen you as a trophy, Lorelei. I only said that because I didn’t want it to be any different than what I’d known before. But it already was. From the moment we met. And that passion of yours—I never want you to lose it.’

‘You broke our date!’ She knew it was a small thing, but suddenly it assumed the huge dimensions it had always held inside her head and heart. Because she hadn’t completely trusted him after that, and when he’d let her down she’d been half expecting it.

She needed to know why.

‘Call it a last-ditch attempt to throw myself across the track. I knew even then I would love you to distraction. That night when I was coming out of that bar, and you were going in, I was on my way to see you.’

He loved her
to distraction?

‘You were?’ Lorelei felt a rush of warmth dispelling the last of the coldness that had been dwelling within her these last two days. ‘I wish you’d told me. I wish this had all been different....’

‘It
is
different. God, Lorelei, I can’t lose you. Nothing matters to me if you’re not there to share it with me. It was never so clear to me as it was today. That race—I was numb. And then I saw you, and suddenly it was clear as light.’

Her heart thrummed and started beating to a slower, truer beat.

‘You were right—what you said that night in Mauritius. The racing was never the point, I was empty, and I found you, and the emptiness went away. I knew I loved you. Deep down I knew it. Every which way I tried to figure it, I kept coming back to this selfish need I had to keep you with me. I kept telling myself you wouldn’t cope, but it was
me.
’

He lowered his voice. ‘I was so afraid of building a life around you and you walking away. I wasn’t prepared to risk it.’

Lorelei laid her hand over his heart.

‘All I want is to love you,’ she said softly, sincerely. ‘If you’ll let me.’

He caught her up fiercely in his arms and for a long time just held on to her. Lorelei thought about the little boy who had craved love, the man he had grown into who had avoided it and its painful associations, and the man standing before her now, holding her so tightly, as if she were as vital to him as the blood in his veins, the air he breathed.

As he was to her.

He loved her for who she was, not who he wanted her to be.

It was a miracle.

Suddenly sobbing for breath, she framed his face tightly with her hands. ‘Wherever you go, wherever you are, that’s where I’ll be. I won’t leave you, I won’t betray you and I won’t stop loving you.’

Nash wrapped her in his arms and kissed her. She could feel him shaking slightly, feel the groundswell of feeling behind the sensual motion of his mouth against hers.

He rested his temple on hers.

‘Just let me love you,’ he said simply, his deep voice shaking with the force of his emotion.

‘Ah, oui,’
she whispered. ‘I can do that, too.’

* * *

It was on a rare sunbathed morning in April when Lorelei stepped out into the gardens of the villa.

A great deal had changed in these parts in six months. A ridiculous amount of money had been poured into restoring the Spanish villa to its original grandeur, and its gardens once more lay in variegated parterres. The fountains sprang to life as the bride joined her father at the top of the steps. Lorelei held one section of her long ivory skirts aloft as she laid her other hand in the crook of her father’s arm.

‘Are you certain,
ma chère?
Nothing is set in stone.’

Lorelei smiled. ‘But it is,
Papa.
It was the moment I set eyes on him.’

Raymond sighed. ‘I suspected as much. So it is
l’amour
and I gain a very rich son-in-law.’

Lorelei’s laughter sang them down the steps. She paused only to pluck a spray of her grandmother’s lavender and tuck it into Raymond’s lapel.

He had been released from prison shortly before Christmas, and was living quietly in Fiesole with wife number five—an older Italian widow with far too much money and a very good accountant. Lorelei was fairly sure Raymond was safe from his own light-fingered proclivities.

Nash waited restlessly with a small congregation of friends and family on the lawn of the old villa. Beyond was the view of Monaco made famous the world over in a much-loved film and the blue curve of the Mediterranean sea.

For the first time in months he hadn’t slept in their bed here at home. He’d been relegated to a suite at the Hotel de Paris, which held special memories for them both.