Chapter 18

Evan

“Good meeting, Joe,” Evan said as he escorted his COO to his office door. “Come up with a game plan and present it to me the next time we meet, all right?”

The older man smiled and nodded before stepping out of Evan’s office into the adjoining area, where Evan’s new secretary sat at her desk, clicking away on her computer. Evan shut the door behind Joe and walked back toward his desk—glancing at the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Potomac River, eager to fire off an e-mail to one of the other company executives to inform them of the new changes—but he paused when he heard a buzz. It was a call on his iPhone. He picked up his pace and jogged across the office, frowning as he did.

Few people called him on this phone. He had only given out the number to family members, to Leila, and to his secretary with express instructions to call it only when all other numbers failed to reach him. When he finally stood in front of his desk, he grabbed the phone and stared down at the screen. Terrence’s name appeared in white letters. Evan was surprised to see it.

He and Terrence hadn’t talked in days, not since he had seen Terrence with that reporter at the bistro in Chesterton. In retrospect, Evan could have handled the encounter better, but he had been so shocked to find out that she was the one who had gotten Terrence back into the dating game, that she was the one whom Terrence had been asking to use Bill’s services to escort her to dinner dates and picnics—that Evan hadn’t been able to keep up a polite façade. How had this woman managed to weasel her way into Terrence’s circle? She certainly wasn’t much to look at—about average level of attractiveness, at best. But more importantly, what had she done to make Terrence take sides with her over his own brother?

Evan and Terrence had always been close. During their childhood, they knew they couldn’t turn to their dad for guidance or affection. That man had all the warmth of the Snow Miser, and his advice had been so harsh and emotionless, it bordered on sociopathic. Their mother, Angela, had been a kind, gentle woman, but she was so browbeaten and wary of their father that she wouldn’t even sneeze without George’s approval. The Murdoch kids could turn to her for a warm hug and a kiss, but that was about it. No, if they really needed advice, if they really needed someone in their corner, they knew they had to look no further than each other. It had always been that way since he and Terrence were little boys.

So, to hear Terrence say, “No, you stay . . . To hell with him! He can go,” had been like a punch to the gut to Evan. He had never felt so betrayed by Terrence in his life and they had certainly had some knock-out, drag-out fights in the past thirty years. Evan had been too hurt to call his brother to try to talk to him and make things right, and Terrence probably had been too stubborn to call Evan to do the same. So for three days, the two brothers had been at a stalemate. It looked like Terrence had caved first—to Evan’s great relief.

Evan pressed the green button on the glass screen and raised his phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“So what the fuck was that about?” Terrence snarled.

At the sound of Terrence’s voice, Evan smiled despite his brother’s less than conciliatory tone.

“Hi, Terry, how are you?” he deadpanned before pulling his chair from his desk and sitting down.

“Why’d you go off on C. J. like that? What was that shit about me having nothing to do with her?”

Evan leaned back in his chair and loosened his necktie. “You are aware that she’s a reporter for the Chesterton Times, right?”

“Yeah, and? So what?”

“She’s written stories about Murdoch Conglomerated before. Less-than-flattering ones, in fact,” Evan continued. “She hounded me for almost a year trying to get an interview. She even followed me to a lunch meeting. I had to threaten her with a restraining order to get her to leave me the hell alone!”

“Look, Ev, that’s her job! Maybe C. J. gets . . . I don’t know . . . a little overzealous sometimes, but that doesn’t mean she—”

“She showed up at the hospital the day after your accident. She lied and told the desk nurse that she was your fiancée so that she could get in your room and interview you. Did she tell you that?”

Terrence fell silent.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. I can only imagine what story she planned to write about you that day . . . or what story she still plans to write. You need to be careful with her, Terry, with what you say to her. She might be gunning for you or our family.”

“C. J. . . . C. J. wouldn’t do that,” Terrence argued, but Evan could already hear the hint of doubt in his brother’s voice. “She’s not like that.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s obvious to me that you don’t know enough about this woman to make that call. She hasn’t told you the full truth. I’m just saying, tread carefully . . . or better yet, whatever you have going on with her, cut it off now.”

Terrence paused. Evan heard him anxiously clear his throat on the other end of the line, making Evan roll his eyes heavenward.

“Jesus, Terry, there are other woman in the world! Don’t risk your reputation and public embarrassment for a piece of ass! Is she really that good in bed?” he asked sarcastically.

“I . . . I wouldn’t know,” Terrence mumbled.

Evan furrowed his brows in confusion. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean, we . . . she and I . . . we haven’t had sex yet. We’ve come close . . . real close, but we haven’t . . . done it.”

“But you’ve been seeing her for more than a month. Since when do you take that long to have sex with someone?”

“Since now, goddamn it!” Terrence growled, making Evan pull his phone away from his ear. “Since now! You think I don’t want to have sex with her? You think I haven’t tried? I have! But she wants to take things slow and ‘ease into it,’ whatever the fuck that means! I didn’t want to push her too hard, so I’ve been holding back and now every time she leaves I feel like I’m going to punch my fist through a brick wall. I haven’t been this sexually frustrated since I was thirteen years old, beatin’ off to Black Tail magazine!”

Evan laughed despite himself. “Well, that’s even more of a reason to cut her off. Don’t let her play these head games with you anymore. End it now!”

“I . . . I can’t, Ev.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? Why the hell not?”

Terrence didn’t answer him. He fell silent again, leaving Evan totally perplexed. Suddenly, a thought dawned in Evan’s head. He slowly sat forward in his chair. His mouth fell open in shock.

“Are you in love with her?”

“No!” Terrence cried a little too quickly and too keenly. “Of . . . of course not!”

“Terry, be honest with me. Are you in love with her?” Evan repeated again more slowly.

“No! Well, I don’t think . . . I am. B-but, you know . . . I haven’t . . . well, I haven’t—”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, Terry! Are you serious? You don’t fall for anyone after all these years and then this is the woman you fall in love with—a reporter who could possibly bring down our entire family by putting all our shit in the newspaper?”

“I never said I was in love with her!” Terrence argued. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to C. J. and ask her about all this stuff. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for it.”

“Yeah, you do that,” Evan muttered, still dumbfounded.

Terrence was in love. This was the same man who had once compared being in love to getting lobotomized, or who had said he could never envision himself being with one woman longer than a month, let alone for the rest of his life. This man was now in love with someone and he couldn’t have picked a worse candidate to bestow those affections upon.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Terrence mumbled before hanging up, leaving Evan to hang up, too—in disgust. His desk phone rang and he quickly picked it up.

“Mr. Murdoch,” his secretary said, “are you busy, sir?”

He blew out a slow gust of air before scrubbing his hand over his face tiredly. “No, Adrienne, I’m not busy. What is it?”

“Well, uh . . . you have a woman out here waiting for you, sir,” she whispered. “She isn’t on the schedule, but she . . . she insists that she must speak with you now.”

Evan frowned. “What woman?”

“She says . . . she says she’s your wife, sir.”

Oh shit, Evan thought, closing his eyes.

If he hadn’t spoken to Terrence in days, he hadn’t spoken to his wife, Charisse, in weeks. Evan hadn’t known how to respond to her tearful outburst or her revelation about her father. Even though the matter of their divorce still wasn’t resolved, Evan hadn’t called her to rectify it. It seemed callous, maybe even cruel, to bring up something like that in light of everything she had told him. He wanted to give her some time before he broached the topic of her finally signing their divorce papers.

“You can send her in,” he said.

“Uh, y-yes, r-right away, sir,” Adrienne replied, and he heard her murmur something just before he hung up.

Evan sat upright in his chair and adjusted his tie. He felt like he was meeting the CEO from another company, preparing for an arduous round of contract negotiations, but the truth was, this was actually a lot worse. His relationship with Leila and his own emotional well-being could be on the line if this continued to drag out with Charisse. He hoped she was here to finally say she was ready to move on and let him go.

The door opened and Adrienne gestured into his office, smiling politely. Charisse strode in behind her. She wasn’t wearing the haphazard ponytail, flip-flops, and oversized shirt today. She looked a lot more like the Charisse he remembered from the old days: the one who bought racks’ worth of dresses and suits from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, who got weekly mani-pedis. She was wearing a frilly blouse and teal skirt today along with kitten heels. Her hair was down and her blond, glossy curls undulated in waves down her back and around her shoulders.

“Hello, Charisse,” he said.

“Hello, Evan.” She removed her Chanel purse from her shoulder and walked toward him. “Your secretary seemed surprised to discover you had a wife,” she said with raised brows before sitting in one of the Bauhaus chairs facing his desk.

“She’s new, and frankly, it’s been a while since you’ve been around here. It was an honest mistake.”

Charisse pursed her lips and crossed her legs. “Yeah, well, I hope to rectify that problem so a ‘mistake’ like that doesn’t happen again.”

Evan narrowed his eyes at her. “What does that mean?”

“Before I get into that . . . First, let me apologize for how I behaved the last time we saw each other. That’s not . . .” She looked down at her lap. “That’s not how I intended that conversation to go.”

“It’s quite all right,” he said and he meant it. “You’re allowed to get emotional about something like that. Anyone would. I’m sorry your father did that to you. I wish I would have known then maybe I would’ve . . .”

“Then maybe you would’ve what?”

Then maybe I would have acted differently, treated you differently, he wanted to say.

He shook his head instead. “Never mind.”

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry for how I behaved, because it took me off track from what I really wanted to say to you that day. Evan, I meant it when I told you I wanted to try to make our marriage work. Give me a chance to be the wife I always wanted to be.”

He loudly sighed. So she hadn’t come here to tell him she was changing her mind after all. “Charisse, I told you that isn’t possible. Leila and I are going to get married.”

“But you’re forgetting the little detail that you’re already married to me.”

“Look, I can’t . . . you don’t . . . Leila and I are going to have a baby, all right?” he blurted out. “She’s pregnant.”

Charisse’s face drained of all color. Her gaze sprang from her lap when he said that, and in her big blue eyes he saw so much pain and anguish. He knew what she was thinking. They had tried to have their own baby years ago without success and now he was having one with someone else, with a woman she openly despised.

Charisse closed her eyes, cleared her throat, and slowly opened her eyes again. She pushed back her shoulders. “I’ll . . . I’ll accept whatever baby you have with her as . . . as my own,” she said softly, making him stare at her in disbelief. “If she can give you the son or daughter you always wanted, I won’t . . . I won’t begrudge you that, but it still doesn’t mean that you have to marry her, Ev. Men have babies with women all the time and they don’t rush to the altar.”

“I’m not marrying her because she’s having my baby; I’m marrying her because I love her! I told you that!”

She pointed at her chest. “You also told me that you loved me!”

“I told you that years ago! But so much has happened that there’s no way—”

“And when you said it, you were just as earnest,” she charged. “So I’m supposed to believe that when you said it to me, you didn’t mean it, but now you mean it when you say it to her?”

He rested his elbows on his glass desk and dropped his face into his hands. “Charisse, you’re not hearing me,” he murmured into his palms.

“No, I hear you loud and clear, Ev! You’re not hearing me. So now I’ll just have to state it plainly.” She leaned forward in her chair. “I am not willing to give you a divorce and if you insist on pushing this issue, I’m going to have to play hardball.”

He lowered his hands. Hardball?

“I don’t want to do it, but you’re leaving me with no choice. I already consulted a lawyer and he said that even though you and I may have both cheated, your affair predates mine, so that would put you—not me—in violation of our prenup. I could argue in court that I still get half of your estate, in addition to half of your shares in Murdoch Conglomerated, because of your transgression.”

His disbelief evaporated and now flamed into anger. “That’s . . . that’s bullshit! You were fucking Dante long before Leila and I started seeing each other. You know that and I know that! You told me so yourself! You had been cheating with him for almost a year.”

“No, as I recall, my relationship with Dante was very brief,” she said, taking on a stilted tone like she had been coached.

Probably by her lawyer, Evan thought with annoyance.

“I only slept with Dante a few times,” she continued. “I turned to him for comfort after I found out my husband was cheating on me with his then-secretary, Leila Hawkins. I was quite devastated. That and the alcohol Dante kept plying me with obviously impaired my judgment. If it wasn’t for that, I never would have cheated on my husband.” She smiled primly and adjusted the hem of her skirt.

He shook his head. “That’s a nice performance, but no judge would believe it.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But while you’re arguing your case and I’m arguing mine, our divorce won’t be finalized. That baby of yours could be five years old before you could legally marry someone else.”

Evan’s jaw tightened. Now he could see the old Charisse reemerging: the bitter, manipulative, and vengeful woman who had made his life such a bleak place until Leila had come back to Chesterton and become the bright light to banish all that darkness.

“Okay, fine.” He interlocked his fingers and gazed coolly at his wife. “What do you want? What’s the end game? You and I both know you don’t give a damn about owning part of Murdoch Conglomerated. Do you want the house? The cars? Do you want more alimony?”

“No, Evan, for the umpteenth time, I just want my husband back! I want my rightful place at your side as Mrs. Evan Murdoch. I’m not ceding my spot to anyone, especially her.” She rose from her chair and wiped fussily at a wrinkle in her blouse. “I’ll give you a few weeks to think it over. Let me know your decision.”

He watched dumbfounded as Charisse turned, strode toward his office door, and opened it. She paused to turn and look back at him. “Believe it or not, Evan, I still love you. And I’m not giving up on us—ever.”

She then shut the door behind her.