Lewis gave up trying to pretend anymore.
Madeline sat opposite him at the kitchen table, disinterestedly pushing the steak and stir-fry he’d made around her plate. She’d just recounted the details of her visit to the hospital and she looked done in. And he’d stopped pretending he didn’t want to help anymore.
Lewis knew all about how the actions of a parent impacted a child, shaped their lives. If he was lucky enough to have kids, he would make damn sure any mistakes were owned up to and compensated for at the time, not left until the children were scarred by it.
“Rough day, huh?”
She smiled sadly. “Rough couple of days.”
He’d not had a good day himself. The statement he’d given the paper had caused a bit of a fuss amongst the board of directors. From the calls he’d taken, no one had a problem with him sleeping with the newly appointed COO. They did, however, have doubts about a potential conflict of interests. Had Madeline known about the proposed corporate takeover? And how much, if any, influence had Lewis had over her appointment?
With Kay’s help, he’d spent the day organizing a telephone conference call with all of the board for tomorrow. Most were en route back to their countries of residence. Only two of the directors lived in New Zealand and he was picking them up from the airport in the morning. There were several in Australia, and some as far afield as Paris and the United States, so time zones had to be considered. He’d finally nailed them down to midday tomorrow. He expected to be hauled over the coals for his actions, but he wasn’t sorry. Madeline was blameless. She’d gotten the job on her own merit. No conflict of interest as far as he was concerned.
She finally pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers. “About the statement you made…”
He didn’t regret sticking his neck out for her on this. If they kept to the same tune, he was sure he could sway the directors. “It should, I hope, ease some of your embarrassment here.”
“It does, and I’m grateful.” She paused. “But it’s not true.”
“It doesn’t obligate you in any way,” Lewis said quickly. “It’s just a united front until the fuss dies down.”
She inhaled. “It obligates me into perpetuating the lie.”
Lewis steepled his fingers, mimicking her. “It sounds a bit better than what everyone thinks, that we had a couple too many drinks and decided to have a quickie in a public elevator.”
She blinked. “As I said, I am grateful. It was—nice, what you did. But these things have a habit of coming out. People are going to want to know the whens and the wheres. We’re digging a hole for ourselves.”
But we’re in it together, he thought. “Well, I think it will blow over quickly now. And when you get to work and people see you in action…”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “Perhaps my position in the company might be compromised.”
Lewis should have known she’d realize how the corporate mind worked. He shrugged. “I’ve organized a conference call with the board of directors tomorrow, but don’t worry about it. I think I can shoot down their concerns.”
Her brows arched.
“Conflict-of-interest issue. How much you knew about the takeover and so on.” Something stopped him from citing one of the directors who suggested that perhaps she wasn’t COO material. “Leave it to me. There’s nothing to worry about, so long as we’re on the same page.”
“Same page?” she asked.
Lewis sighed patiently. “If anyone asks, we met overseas, I asked you to move to Australia. You knew nothing of the takeover bid, since you’d lived overseas for years and we didn’t waste our precious time talking business.”
Her brows lifted even higher.
“You kept the Premier job news a secret and came over here to attend the conference and sort out some personal stuff. We’ll say it was as much a shock to me to see you in the Executive Committee meeting as it was to you when I walked in.” He smiled wryly. “That, at least, is the truth.”
Madeline held his gaze steadily. “Sounds like we need a scriptwriter for all that.”
That ticked him off. He’d thought he was helping.
“The newspapers are after me to make a comment,” Madeline said. “That’s an awful lot to lie about. What if they ask for dates and places, where we met, when?”
“Say no comment. They’ll get bored soon enough and I’ll handle the directors, don’t worry about that,” he said confidently.
“You wouldn’t have to handle the directors if you’d discussed it with me first,” she said quietly.
Lewis sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You’ve got a lot on your mind.”
“It’s my mother,” she said, looking away from him. “I don’t know how much time she has left.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“It’s not what the doctors say. It’s me. I feel I should be here for her now.”
Lewis exhaled. “Well, take some leave. A couple of weeks, and then, when she seems stable…”
“I want to make it up to her so at least she doesn’t have me on her conscience, as well.”
She’d spoken almost over the top of him, as if she hadn’t heard him. Now she picked up her utensils and began scraping her leftovers onto his plate.
“Leave that,” he snapped. “Take some time…”
“My priorities have changed,” she began.
Why was he even bothering? “Use your head, Madeline. What the hell would you do here? You’re a businesswoman, not some small-town girl.”
She picked up both plates and stood. “I thought so, but…” She turned and walked to the sink.
“Don’t you think you’re being a bit emotional about this?” he asked.
The plates banged down on the bench with a crack. “She’s my mother, for God’s sake! I’m allowed to be emotional.” Her back bristled with tension and she just stood there at the sink not facing him.
Lewis lost the battle with his patience. “There are retirement homes in Sydney. I’ll get my assistant to send you some information.”
Madeline whirled around, eyes flashing. “This is her home. She’s lived her whole life here.”
Something had changed; he could see that. He’d done his best to needle her throughout the conference, but it was “steady as she goes,” all the way.
Not anymore. He took a deep breath. “She has Alzheimer’s disease, Madeline. Most of the time she won’t know or care where the hell she is.”
She jerked as if he’d slapped her. Her eyes filled with disappointment and then slid away from his, leaving him feeling hollow, cutting him to the bone. She stalked into the lounge.
Hell, he hadn’t meant to be callous.
But no one walked away from him. He headed after her, stopped when he saw her sitting on the couch leaning forward with her head in her hands.
His formidable chief of operations? His sexy responsive lover? Which? The lines had suddenly blurred and he didn’t know which was more important to him. All he knew was, he wanted her in Sydney to find out.
She looked up and saw him watching her. “You have no heart,” she said, and Lewis knew that if he didn’t give her something, something of himself, he’d lose her.
He sat down beside her, and she watched him, that same dark disappointment in her eyes. Her hands twisted in her lap. “What made you so hard?” she whispered.
“I’ve had to be.”
Jacques de Vries was Lewis’s whole reason for living for the past two years. Now that he’d vanquished that septic thorn in his side, the sensible thing to do was to set some more goals, purge the revenge he’d supped on for two years.
Or else, with too much time on his hands, he was in danger of falling for a beautiful blonde with summer-blue eyes.
Lewis had never told another soul about his checkered childhood. He shied away from why he felt compelled to tell Madeline now. He wanted to take his time with her, and for that, she’d need to be in Sydney, so he’d better start making up for hurting her just now.
She arched one dark brow, waiting for him to speak, to lay bare his past.
“Jacques de Vries killed my father.”
She exhaled slowly, her lips parting.
“Not what you expected?” he asked lightly. “I discovered that charming piece of news a couple of years ago, while identifying the body of my brother, whose death Jacques also had a hand in.”
Madeline drew her legs up under her and leaned back in her seat, her eyes on his all the while.
Start at the beginning, he thought. “My father and Jacques were business partners in the early eighties. They ran a transport company taking aid throughout the African continent. We, my parents and I, lived just outside Nairobi.”
It was a great life for a boy. Kenya was so colorful, the people warm. Lewis and his parents weren’t rich by any stretch, but comfortable enough to have a great old house on the outskirts of town, with a housekeeper and cook. Lewis attended a school in Nairobi and spent every other minute having adventures.
“But one day, when I was seven, the police came for my father and threw him in jail, charged him with stealing the aid supplies and selling them on the black market. Jacques was in France, visiting his wife. My mother tried to get some help, some answers, but no one helped. After a week or so, she took me out of school and back to Australia.”
Lewis had fought long and hard to be able to stay, wanting to be close to his beloved father. He never even got to say goodbye.
“She dumped me at my grandparents’ house in Sydney, and that was the last I saw of her for months. She went back to see what she could do to get him out.”
It was the worst time of his life. His grandparents were dour people who’d never approved of his father. They thought taking his young wife and child to Africa was irresponsible in the extreme. They enrolled Lewis in school and refused to let him speak of his father. He hated their deathly quiet house with the big ticking grandfather clock and all the surfaces gleaming, stinking of polish.
“When my mother finally came home, she was pregnant and deeply depressed. She hadn’t been able to get my father released and had to trust that Jacques would pull off some miracle. She tried to prepare me for the worst. At the rate justice moved in Africa, it could be years before we saw him again.”
All their money was tied up in the company. As much as both he and his mother hated staying with her disapproving parents, they were destitute. He’d never stopped nagging her to leave, felt bad about that now, but he hated living there so much. His mother knew, as he did not, the practicalities of being on her own with one child and another on the way.
“When Ed—my brother—was a couple of years old, Mum went on a benefit and we moved into a small flat. I think the grandparents were glad to be rid of us by then.”
His mother never emerged from the depression and as soon as they moved away from her parents, she began drinking. Many days, Lewis bunked school to keep an eye on the toddler because his mother was trawling the town for money for drink, or passed out in bed. But he had to be careful. The grandparents were suspicious and he knew they would bring in the authorities if there was any question she wasn’t looking after the boys properly.
“My father died of cholera, but we didn’t find out for a long time. He was still in jail with charges pending, but no conviction. It was like everyone just forgot about him. Poor Ed never even knew his dad.
“The next few years were hard, moneywise. Mum stuck Ed in child care and did a bit of cleaning. I had a paper round, but a lot of the money went on drink. And Ed was growing up wild.” He smiled fondly. “He was trouble from the day he was born, always wanted what he couldn’t have. When he started school, he’d just take things from the other kids if he wanted them. I had permanently bruised knuckles from keeping the school bullies away.”
Madeline’s leg moved out casually and her sock-covered foot nudged his thigh. He looked down and rubbed his knuckles. “Everyone said he was weird looking. He had this round head…” Lewis was too ashamed to tell her the truth. The bullies said Ed stank. He stank because he wet the bed every night of his life, and at thirteen or fourteen, Lewis didn’t have the common sense to insist he shower before going to school.
“Ed inherited Mum’s depression, I reckon,” he said slowly, not keen to go into too many details. He recalled one day finding his brother drunk on the dregs of a bottle of whiskey his mother hadn’t finished the day before. The little boy was only seven or eight years old.
When Lewis did go to school, he never knew what he would find when he got home. Sometimes there was a man, as drunk as his mother. Often he found her facedown in her own vomit. He and Ed would drag her down the hallway into her room, then Lewis would clean her up, put a pillow under her head and blankets over her and leave her to sleep it off on the floor. Once he got bigger, of course, he was able to wrestle her into bed himself.
He looked up to find her watching him closely. “I looked after them, I suppose. No one else was going to.
“I left school at sixteen and got a job as a storeman for a courier company, but with me out of the house all day, Ed hardly went to school and Mum didn’t bother working anymore. But things picked up. With some help from my boss, I started my own business at eighteen, a courier franchise. We just kept speculating, and pretty soon the money was pouring in. I’d made my first million by the time I turned twenty-three.”
No matter how good things were, his mother was still a drunk—just a better-dressed drunk with a better address. “But Ed,” he said sadly, “he got away on me. He abused drugs for all of his teens.”
The nights he cruised Kings Cross in the city looking for his younger brother would have numbered in the hundreds. There was no question of his leaving home—who would keep an eye on the other two? That put a dampener on his love life for all of his twenties. Since Lewis never knew what he’d find when he got home from work, there was no way he’d bring a girlfriend into the mix.
Then things looked up for a while. “Ed suddenly decided when he turned twenty he’d had enough of the drugs. He was a whiz with IT so I gave him all the encouragement I could.
“I finally got my own place at the ripe old age of thirty. Mum still drank but she went to AA meetings and she met a fellow drunk. They’re still together, still drinking, but they have each other and a nice house to get blotto in.”
Madeline smiled bleakly. Lewis bet she was thinking how different her straitlaced childhood was compared to his. How could two families be so very different and yet both dysfunctional in the extreme?
“And then a couple of years ago, I got a call from the cops, or Interpol or something, saying I had to go to Singapore to identify Ed’s body. It was a drug overdose. I couldn’t believe it. He’d been clean for three years.”
He felt her foot pressing his thigh again and absently dropped his hand onto it and left it there. He wouldn’t bother telling her about the horror of it all. Being classified as guilty by association and enduring strip searches in both Singapore and when he came back to Australia. He wouldn’t tell her how much of a failure he felt as he stood over his little brother’s white, lifeless body in a morgue far from home.
Her foot moved under his hand, pressed against his leg. “Why?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t make sense of it at the time. It took weeks getting through the formalities, bringing the body home, dealing with the cops there and in Australia.”
“Your poor mother,” Madeline said quietly. “Poor you.”
Grief and guilt had consumed him, but he’d had to be strong for his mother, who went absolutely blotto. At one point, he seriously considered having her committed or put in rehab or something.
“A woman—Natasha—turned up at the funeral, said she was a friend of Ed’s. I…got to know her.”
Lewis wasn’t proud of himself for the way he’d behaved. Natasha was French, beautiful, wild. After the stress of the last few weeks, he surrendered to a crazy lust. She was exotic and intense and they spent a week in bed before he started to wonder if she really was crazy, or worse, on drugs like Ed.
“She wanted to meet my mother, so one day I took her there, and suddenly she was screaming at Mum, she attacked her, slapped her, I had to haul her off. Ed wasn’t my father’s kid at all. He was Jacques’s. She was Ed’s half sister.”
“After I’d thrown Natasha out, my mother confessed all. Jacques was kind, the only person in Nairobi who tried to help her make the authorities understand that her husband wasn’t a crook. But nothing happened. Day after day, she visited the prison, pleaded with every authority she could think of. Jacques told her bribery was the only way, so she did that, too. The lawyers didn’t want to touch the case. Nothing happened, everyone just kept saying come back tomorrow, maybe something will happen tomorrow.”
Madeline shook her head with a sad smile. “That’s exactly how some countries work, and not just in Africa.” She shifted to lean her back against him with her feet up on the other end of the couch.
“Finally my mother snapped, I suppose.” And Jacques de Vries was there to pick up the pieces, he thought bitterly. “Jacques ‘comforted’ her. But the moment she told him she was pregnant, he threw her out. He didn’t want an affair with his jailed business partner’s wife. He went back to his wife and child in France. Mum had nowhere to go but home. He gave her a few thousand, nothing like her share of the business, and she gave up, came home and tried to cope best she could.”
“No wonder she was depressed,” Madeline murmured. “What happened to Natasha?”
“She was heading back to Singapore when I caught up with her. She said she had proof that it was Jacques, not my father, who’d been responsible for ripping off millions of dollars worth of aid. She couldn’t prove it, but suspected he’d bribed police and insurance officials. But she did have documents showing he’d received a vast insurance payout for the company when it folded. He went back to France, divorced his wife and set up his hotel corporation with the proceeds of the transport company, plus, I suppose what he got from his Black Market dealing. Silly bugger left a lot of the paperwork in the family home, which is how Natasha got hold of it.”
“Can you prove it? Clear your father’s name?”
The million-dollar question and, for a long time, his greatest desire. His poor father rotting in jail for years while his best friend and partner lived it up. No family to support him…Lewis inhaled deeply. If there was any way he could achieve that now, he’d be a happy man.
“It’s—complicated. I hired some investigators. Their findings and some of the documents Natasha came up with would have made a pretty good case against Jacques, if I wanted to bankroll it, which I did. But some of the documents had my mother’s signature on them. She swears she knows nothing of the fraud, but she had signed things, with Jacques’s supervision. She thought they were gift certificates he told her would help pave the way for Dad’s release. She certainly didn’t profit from the insurance payout or after the company was wound up. Jacques told her he’d lost everything, too. I’d like nothing better than to see him behind bars.” He gave a short, sharp laugh. “Actually I’d like nothing better than to see his eyes bulging with the pressure of my hands around his neck.”
It had taken superhuman control the day of the Executive Committee meeting not to do that very thing when he went to see the man before publicly ousting him.
“But I can’t be absolutely sure that the authorities wouldn’t go after my mother.”
Madeline snuggled in closer and he heard her yawn. “So you went after his company instead.”
His arms tightened around her. “My company,” he growled. “Born of the destruction of my family.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes and Lewis wondered if she’d dropped off to sleep. The fire was toasty and he felt tired himself. He hadn’t been counting, but he reckoned he was on the debit side of hours of sleep since he’d arrived in Queenstown and met Madeline Holland.
She suddenly heaved a great sigh while he rested his chin on her hair. “But I still don’t understand why Ed did what he did.”
Her hair smelled like apricots. “Who knows? Natasha contacted him by e-mail and said she knew who his real father was, and to meet her in Singapore. She told him Jacques’s name. That’s all I know for sure. I think he confronted Jacques and things went badly, leaving Ed so distraught he took some bad drugs. That’s my personal view, but there could be any number of things. Jacques denies meeting him in person though admits Ed contacted him by phone. Whatever the chain of events, something led to Ed taking a massive dose of heroin, a dose he must have known, with his experience, would kill him.”
“Well, what did Jacques say when you told him you knew about him?”
A fist of hate squeezed his heart but he was too tired to pander to it. “Laughed in my face and said good luck proving it.”
“What about blackmail—” a yawn caught her unawares “—can’t he be persuaded with the proof you have?”
“Really, Ms. Holland.” Lewis chuckled. “The way your mind works.” He’d spent months weighing up his options before settling on taking the man’s company. “Jacques believed he was untouchable, but he’s quite capable of taking everyone, my mother included, down with him. My way took a long time, but that’s all right. I won.”
A log shifted in the grate, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Lewis’s hands were clasped around her middle, and now Madeline covered them with her own, stroking slowly.
“Am I forgiven,” he murmured into her fragrant hair, “for being heartless before about your mother?”
Her hands stilled. He heard her long breath in and the rasp of his chin on her hair as she nodded.
“You’re forgiven,” she said simply.