The Boss's Proposal (16 page)

He looked at her for a few seconds, holding her terrified
gaze, then he released her hand as though touching it was distasteful. Vicky took a few steps back, her eyes still clamped on his face, searching to discover whether he had meant what he'd said.
Surely not?
The law wouldn't hand over custody of her child to this man, anyway, although the money element was enough to keep a seed of doubt planted in some corner of her mind.

‘Why not?' he shrugged, then rubbed the side of his face again, where she had hit him. She sincerely hoped that she'd broken a few of his teeth in the process, but if she had he was successfully hiding the fact.

‘What do you mean,
why not
?' Vicky asked in an appalled whisper. ‘Chloe's the beginning, the middle and the end of my whole life! If you try and take her away…' Her voice began to waver and, without warning, she broke down. No warm-up of sniffles, no watery eyes as a prelude—she just collapsed into tears, loud, distraught, uncontrollable sobbing that was imbued with all the grief that she'd experienced over the past few years, starting with her mother's death.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' Max muttered, standing up, ‘I don't intend to take your child away from you. It was a threat.' He thrust a handkerchief into her hand and Vicky clutched it gratefully, pressing it to her eyes. ‘How the hell do you think I feel?' he all but yelled, striding restlessly around the room, his fingers raking through his dark hair. With her face pressed against the handkerchief and her head downturned, she could still feel the energy emanating out of him like an electric current.

‘One minute I have a good secretary, the next minute I discover that the good secretary is the mother of my niece! And you stand there, sobbing and pleading with me to believe that there was no hint of a hidden agenda anywhere on the dinner menu?'

Vicky lifted puffy, red eyes to him and said, ‘Yes.'

‘
Yes? Yes?
Is that
all
you have to say on the matter? You just
expect
me to take you at your word and write it all off to
quirky coincidence
?' He paused in front of her. His dark hair was a mess and his searching eyes made her look away hurriedly.

‘Yes,' she repeated weakly. ‘I mean, that's what
I've
written it all off to.' She sighed deeply and then proceeded to do origami with the handkerchief, folding it and unfolding it until he finally snatched it off her and shoved it back into his pocket.

‘Sit down,' he commanded, ‘and explain.'

‘Only if you're prepared to listen to me.'

‘I'll try.'

It was better than nothing, even though his expression, while not seething with hostility as it had been a couple of minutes ago, was still cynical enough to make her want to abandon her explanations before she'd even begun.

‘I met your brother in Australia when I was nineteen. I…' She stumbled in the face of the uphill task facing her. How could she summarise six years of her life in the space of fifteen minutes when every day of every month of all those years was filled with emotional detail? She took a deep breath. ‘I'd gone to Australia to live with my aunt—well, you know all of this, but when my mother died, I just couldn't face staying on in England. My mum and I had always planned to go on a joint holiday to visit Aunt Ruth and, well, it seemed as though the moment had come when Mum was no longer around. I couldn't bear being in the house but I couldn't bear the thought of selling it, either. That's why I rented it out. Mum's funeral was on the Tuesday and by the following Tuesday I was on a plane leaving England for what I thought would be six months. I ended up staying for nearly six years.'

‘And why was that?' The timbre of his deep voice almost made her start.

‘Lots of reasons.' She shrugged and avoided his silver eyes. ‘The weather was good. Aunt Ruth was so thrilled to see me that she managed to persuade me to apply for an extension on my visa and then, when that came through, it seemed as though destiny wanted me to stay. And then I landed the job working as a personal assistant to the director of a public relations company. It was a huge responsibility and I adored it, even though I knew that James mainly hired me because of my English accent. He missed England. He used to say that having me around was like having his own private rose garden in the office.' Her lips softened into a smile of fond memory and Max scowled. He could feel his fingers pushing against the fabric of the chair from the effort of controlling his rampant rage and jealousy. Knowing that his brother had slept with her, fathered a child by her, fuelled a sense of obliterating anger. He wanted to shout and rip the house down. He could barely breathe properly, and here she was, smiling at the mention of her ex-boss. Another lover, perhaps? One more trophy? He struggled to maintain some balance, although his jaws ached.

‘How nice,' he said tightly. ‘And was he another one of your lovers, alongside my brother?'

‘That's a horrible thing to say!'

‘Is it?' He could feel himself wanting to hurt her and steeled himself against the temptation. ‘I took you at face value and now here I am, confronted by a woman who had a child by my brother, slept with me and has God knows how many more skeletons locked away in her closet somewhere.'

‘There
are
no more skeletons. I know you think…you feel—'

‘
Think
what?
Feel
what?'

‘Angry with me. Disappointed…'

Max tried to modulate the decibel level of his voice when he next spoke. It wouldn't do to have the neighbours flying over to the house because of the noise. ‘
Angry? Disappointed?
Yes, those two will do for starters.'

Vicky looked uncertainly at him, scared at the underlying savagery she sensed and, worse, understood. She knew that she'd done far more than disappoint him. She knew that she'd destroyed his trust for ever and the thought of that made her feel sick.

‘I met your brother while I was working for James.' She leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes. ‘And I'll admit that for a while, I was…I suppose, infatuated with him. I had just gone through a very bad patch, I was still trying to recover from Mum's death and Shaun was like a tonic. Always on a high. Happy. I was completely taken in with his live-for-today attitude. It was just what I needed.' She risked a look at Max from under her lashes. He was sitting very still. Only the muscle in his jaw showed that he was hearing a word she said.

‘We started dating and it was fun, for a while. I'd never experienced life in the fast lane, and Shaun was very much someone who lived in the fast lane. Sports cars, late-night parties, exotic friends. It was all very exciting for a while.'

Her words were drifting in and out of his head. The
for a while
lifted his spirits temporarily, because it promised that worse was to come, but he found that he couldn't focus on anything she was saying. Not really. He was too busy thinking about her in bed with Shaun, too busy feeling betrayed by her casual deception, too busy agonising over the fact that nothing she could say or do, however horrendous, could kill his fast-growing feelings towards her.

‘What was that?'

‘I asked what…what
you
thought of your brother,' Vicky said timidly. She had sometimes wondered whether she hadn't misjudged Shaun, or whether there hadn't been something in
her
that had driven him to turn into a monster when he found himself in her company. Maybe it hadn't been
him
at all. Maybe the fault had lain with
her
.

‘Wild. Reckless. Prone to excess. I'm surprised you found him so appealing. Did you enjoy living on a knife's edge?'

‘I suppose I must have. For a while.'

‘You keep saying that.
For a while
this,
for a while
that. What does that
mean
?' He shot her a brooding, glowering look and then abruptly stood up and resumed his restless pacing around the room, as though the confines of the chair were stifling him.

‘It
means
that after a few months I…I began to see another side to your brother. A much…darker side.'

Max stopped pacing and turned to look at her. ‘What
darker side
?'

‘Did you communicate with Shaun?'

‘Oh, yes. Christmas cards.' His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘My attempts to communicate with my brother ended when we were about…sixteen. From there on in we might just as well have been strangers.'

‘Then perhaps you don't know that Shaun—'

‘Dabbled with drugs?' he asked intuitively, watching the contours of her expressive face. ‘Of course I knew. It was one of the reasons he was sent to Australia. His opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over. I tried to talk some sense into him before he went, tried to make him see that he was damaging himself by taking drugs, but Shaun stopped listening to me, like I say, when we were still kids. I found out what he was up to through our father, whose
only contact was through mutual friends over there. I take it the straight and narrow path didn't last long?'

‘No.' Having waded through the factual aspect of her relationship with Shaun, she now screeched to a halt. The personal stuff was still too raw for her to expose in a storybook fashion, as though nothing she was describing had actually happened to
her
or damaged her the way it had.

‘So what happened?'

For the first time since she had embarked on her explanation, Vicky stood up and watched him from behind her chair with a shuttered, stubborn expression.

‘I'd rather not wade through all of that,' she muttered.

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's irrelevant.'

‘I happen to find it highly relevant.'

‘Why? Aside from assuaging your curiosity, why do you care about the nuts and bolts of what happened between me and your brother?'

Max could feel his anger, previously abated, spring back into life with a vengeance and he gritted his teeth together. ‘You were the last to know my brother, to see him, and, whatever happened in our pasts to sour our relationship, I'd still like to try and find out what was in his mind when he died.'

‘Well, I can't oblige,' she muttered, flushing. ‘What matters now is how we deal with this…situation…'

Max's voice was cold when he spoke. ‘You're out of a job. That's the first step to
dealing with this situation
. You do realise that, don't you?' He didn't give her time to answer his rhetorical question. ‘And I won't be supporting my niece financially from a convenient distance. Close up and personal. That's the role I intend to play.' His mouth was a grim line.

‘I never said—'

‘You don't need to. Whatever you claim your motives were, whether or not you intended me to find out about her, I suspect that the thought of money winging its way through your front door would compensate for the loss of your job.' He stood up and walked slowly around the room, pausing to glance at the occasional ornament or book lying on the shelf, while she watched him in appalled fascination. He had stripped her of her job, which was absolutely fine as far as she was concerned, but she could feel him gnawing away at her dignity, moving in leisurely, threatening circles, giving her only enough breathing space to be terrified of what might come next.

‘I can survive happily without your money,' Vicky bit out sharply. ‘And, just for the record, your brother gave me nothing towards his daughter. I've managed on my own for years and I can carry on managing.' She could feel tears pricking against her eyelids and she blinked them rapidly away.

‘All the right sentiments.' He turned to face her. ‘They might sound good coming from someone else.' He trailed his finger along a shelf, in the manner of someone checking for dust. ‘So here's our little problem. Out of the blue, I have a niece, someone who deserves to carry the family name. I don't intend to run away from my responsibilities, such as they are, which means an investment of time as well as money, and, please—' he held up one hand to cut off the heated protest forming on her lips ‘—spare me the aggrieved pride. As far as I can see it, everything has a solution and here's mine. My niece inherits the family name and so, on an incidental basis, do you. I'm proposing to marry you.'

In the stunned silence that ensued, Vicky's expression went from shock to incredulity and finally to hilarity. She
burst out laughing. She laughed so much that she found herself gasping for breath. Her eyes were streaming and in the absence of a handkerchief, she dabbed them ineffectively with the bottom of her shirt..

‘I fail to see the joke,' he said tightly, which set her off again and when the hoots of laughter had finally subsided into little hiccups, she sobered up enough to say,

‘Of course I won't marry you.' There had been nothing funny about his proposal. Her reaction had been one of delayed shock at finding her foundations rocked, but the thought of marrying him, when she of all people knew that heartache of relationships that exist without love, filled her with a deep, unaccountable sadness. She also knew that any liking, affection, the most remote of warm feelings towards another human being, could tarnish rapidly under the glare of a forced situation, a relationship created for the wrong reasons and endured for the sake of something or, in this case, someone. ‘We don't love one another,' she said, and another stab shot through her, but this time the bitter stab of unrequited love. ‘So what would be the point?'

‘The point would be legitimising my niece; the point would be to create a stable environment for her.'

‘The point would be that we'd be miserable, and misery doesn't make for stability.'