“Call me Lauren,” she chirped. “Ma’am is for the queen and old ladies.”
Marcus smiled politely and I a little embarrassed. I wished they had met under different circumstances. I wished the cold tension between Marcus and me wasn’t there to stain the moment.
“Are you Isaac’s son?” Mom asked with half a frown, then she smoothed her forehead immediately. She never really frowned. Frowning caused terrible wrinkles, more so than laughing ever would, she said.
She was quick to make connections and even quicker to make sense of every situation. I wondered how long it would take her to understand that Marcus was not only a friend and read through the tension smothering us.
“Not by choice,” he answered.
His tension only intensified at the sound of his father’s name, but whether Mom noticed the change in his mood or not, she ignored it and laughed loudly, not surprised that Isaac and his son were on precarious terms. To my astonishment, Marcus laughed too.
“Oh, come on, I made lunch. We have a lot to talk about.”
She led the way to the kitchen, but although we followed, neither Marcus nor I had our hearts in her little celebration.
Chapter 34
Charlotte
As expected, it took Lauren Burton about five minutes into our meal to make sense of the whole situation. Her suspicions solidified when Marcus made some poor excuse and left before dessert. It wasn’t his hasty departure as much as my collapsing mood afterward that tipped her off about our impasse.
We talked about her new gorgeous home in London and how tiring being a plastic surgeon could get, about ballet, the latest royal drama, and how conservative the British were, but all the while, I knew she was dying to ask me everything about Marcus and me.
Once he left, nothing stopped or deterred her from her newfound mission.
“How long have you been together?” she asked dead on.
After tiptoeing around the topic concerning my father, Mom had finally declared she needed to talk to him immediately. I had a feeling that part of the discussion would involve me, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. If I rarely stood up to my father, my mother never had that problem. Hence, the reason their marriage worked better when they were apart.
“Almost two months,” I said, sliding behind the wheel of my car. “It feels much longer than that.”
“It always does,” she smiled wistfully then ducked her head to gauge my expression. “Is this your first fight?”
“Not exactly, but—I don’t know what to do.”
I sighed, and while I drove to the firm, I told her everything, from the night I met Marcus to how we ended up quarreling earlier. Mom was partly amused, partly worried.
“Sweetheart, he must care a lot about you to risk so much. Have you considered the issue from his perspective?”
“Mom, I’m not being ungrateful. It flatters me the way he tries to protect me, but if something happened to him because of me, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“If something happened to you, and he could have prevented it, do you think he would be able to live with himself?”
I sighed sulkily but admitted in my heart that she was right. Mom patted my knee and stared ahead. I had the feeling she was actually siding with Marcus on this.
“Sweetheart,” she said eventually, “I think the best way to work through this predicament is to ask yourself what you would do if the roles were reversed. Would you stay on the sidelines or fight against the world by his side?”
I had my father’s stubbornness and impetuosity, my mother used to tell me. I was quickly upset and difficult to appease, but when she put it like that, I could neither remain upset with Marcus nor irritated that she was defending him.
The firm was uncommonly quiet when we arrived, and my mother, whether because she was the boss’s wife or because she was simply ravishing for a woman in her early fifties, attracted curious glances from everyone around us.
“If you excuse me, I’ll have a word with James now,” she said then took the private elevator that carried her all the way to the top floor.
I waited for my own ride to my office, deep in thought. Wrecked by worry and remorse, I was about to call Marcus when the doors of the elevator slid open to reveal the stiff figure of Isaac King.
He smiled, a peculiar soundless twist of his features that seemed forced and jeering. I walked inside, straightened my dress, and looked ahead, grateful that he didn’t bother with small talk.
“Are you fucking my son, Charlotte?” Isaac turned around and asked.
The phone almost slipped between my fingers as the elevator walls seemed to shrink on me. I felt dizzy, and some invisible weight pushed down on my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
With all that had happened lately, it had seemed ridiculous to worry about who might find about our relationship, but now that Isaac knew, I remembered all the reasons why we shouldn’t have let him know in the first place.
“My private life does not concern you,” I replied coolly. “And don’t forget who you are talking to, Isaac. It’s still my family name up on the wall.”
Isaac hated to be reminded by a woman half his age that he was just an associate in the firm and most certainly would never occupy the seat he craved. His nostrils flared, and he cracked his neck before his frosty eyes zeroed in on me.
“It’s my son’s life that concerns me,” Isaac spat.
“It’s your son’s life you want to control,” I corrected. “Tell me, Isaac, how does it feel to know you can’t do that anymore?”
Isaac smirked without saying a word.
I shuffled a step back and squeezed my eyes shut. My throat felt dry and my muscles rigid. What if Isaac still controlled Marcus? What if the reason he considered accepting the FBI’s deal was that Isaac had coerced him after finding out about our relationship? What if he threatened Marcus to send him to prison if he didn’t comply?
I was not a violent person, but at that very moment, I wished I could slap the triumph off Isaac’s face. He knew I couldn’t be Marcus’s handler if I were intimately involved with him. If he wanted, he could make it look like Marcus never completed the community service the court ordered. Hell, knowing Isaac, he could make it look much worse than that, and I would be in no position to help Marcus.
“It’s because of you that he hadn’t accepted the deal,” Isaac muttered disdainfully.
Air finally filled my lungs. Maybe Isaac hadn’t threatened Marcus into accepting this deal. Maybe I could still make him understand that there had to be another way to battle against everything that the Stewarts threw at us.
“It’s because of me that he won’t have to accept any deal at all coming from you.”
I walked out of the elevator and didn’t look back as I strode to my office. Isaac might not have threatened Marcus yet, but I was going to make sure he would never get the chance to.
“Sophia, get Tanner on the phone now.”
She looked startled but nodded and had Reid Tanner on the line in exactly two minutes. He didn’t sound happy to have been disturbed from whatever he was doing, and he definitely didn’t shy away from expressing his displeasure in a long, colorful speech.
“I need you to run a check on Isaac King,” I cut him off impatiently. “Can you do that?”
“Of course, and in the process should I also get your coffee and cook you dinner and maybe warm your bed before you go to sleep because God forbid you get a cold or worse—do these damn things on your own?!”
“Tanner, can you do that?” I snapped.
“Wait a moment. Isaac King, you said? As in your boyfriend’s father, Isaac King?”
“You ran a check on me?” I yelled, outraged.
“Sweetie, I run a check on every one of my clients. Periodically.”
“Wonderful,” I groaned and rolled my eyes.
“I know, for example, that you love to have breakfast at that Italian place when you are irritable, and sometimes you sneak around at night and
buy cranberry cider, which, let me tell you, is a total waste of money, and oh, my personal favorite, you love to kick men out of your apartment. Well, it was only the one, what was his name? Oh yes, Carter Pierce.”
“Tanner,” I groaned again, but this time the sound was tinged with warning.
I slapped my forehead and gritted my teeth. My face and neck felt unbearably hot, and I was grateful that nobody witnessed my shame. Tanner knew things about me that I was definitely not interested in revisiting or sharing.
The only reason I tolerated his behavior, and apparently his stalking tendencies, was because the man did a damn good job every time I needed him to. Today, however, I didn’t feel very permissive.
“Jesus, you’re no fun,” he complained. “I’ll have your report within the hour.”
One hour later when he called to inform me that he had forwarded his findings to my personal email, he didn’t sound as chipper as before.
“Charlotte, I don’t think you’ll like what’s in that report,” Tanner warned.
“I need leverage against Isaac. It should be him not liking what I read.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Tanner’s last words still rang in my head after I finished reading his report twice. I had looked for dirt on Isaac, for some big secret that would put him under my thumb. I hadn’t expected the dirt I found on him would be so sickening and utterly devastating to Marcus.
Isaac was most certainly no saint, but of all the questionable deeds that stained his character, one stood out, and it involved his wife.
Jacqueline King had been fatally wounded in a car accident twenty-two years ago. I had no recollection of the funeral ceremony since at the time I was only four, but I had grown up hearing my mother talk with regret about her, about what a beautiful person she had been. I had seen her grave once after paying my respects to my grandparents. I had felt Marcus’s boundless pain and longing for the mother who had never been in his life and never gotten the chance to see her son grow up.
But Jacqueline King was alive, and Isaac had always known it.
I slammed my fists against my desk and swiped at the objects on it, sending them smashing to the ground, one by one. The screen of my laptop cracked, and its case broke and skidded onto the floor. My custom pens went clattering, stacks of papers fell with a dull thud, and my favorite mug of coffee shattered to pieces, sending splotches of black everywhere.
Sophia stormed in, her eyes bulging like onions and her mouth hanging so low that it could have fit a coconut. We just stared at each other for what felt like endless minutes, then she walked out and shut the door without intruding or questioning or offering counsel when none was requested.
Nobody disturbed me as I continued crying and trashing my office. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying or why I was raging or why I simply couldn’t stop.
I was sitting on the carpet in front of the sofa that was now half covered by papers, half drenched in water and coffee, with my phone clasped in my hands when my mother burst in, horror settling on her face the instant her eyes landed on me.
“Charlotte what is the meaning of this?” she cried and raised one hand to her chest and the other to her open mouth. “Are you alright, sweetheart? What happened?”
She sat by my side, not caring that most likely she was going to ruin her clothes. She stroked my cheeks, wiping at the running make-up and studying me like I was a terminally ill patient. I didn’t trust my voice to speak, so I pushed the phone into her hands and rested my head in her lap while she read.
If I took after my father where stubbornness was concerned, intuitiveness I had taken after my mother. Perhaps with me more than with other people, she had always been able to tell how I felt and what kind of thoughts tormented me, so after reading Tanner’s report, she understood my rage and despondency without explanations.
“How am I going to tell him?” I sobbed.
She cradled me in her arms, rocked me quietly, and after a while, she managed to lift me onto weak, unsure feet. I noticed then that she was pale, and the corners of her mouth were white. She didn’t say a thing as she wiped under my eyes at the tears I forgot I was shedding and pressed a kiss to my forehead. There was nothing more to add, and yet, there was a lot more to say.
Marcus stalked in my office and stopped short when he caught sight of my mother and me standing disoriented in the middle of the room.
“Charlotte, what happened?”
His arms were wrapped around me instantly. He gripped my chin, firmly but not unkindly, turning my head this way and that. I imagined how I looked with blotchy eyes and mascara sullying my face, with my hair disheveled and a body that didn’t seem to be able to stop trembling.
“Please, talk to me,” he whispered in my ear and watched me with pleading eyes.
I nodded and clung to him, but first, I had to gather myself. I asked my mother to give us the room, and she left, saying she was heading home, or more precisely, to my father’s house, since their conversation wasn’t over yet. As she hurried to the door, she looked like she was running away from what was about to happen.
Then I asked Marcus to drive me to my apartment. I was stalling, but I was also trying to put as much space between him and his father as I could. Once Marcus learned the truth, I wasn’t sure what he would do.
We didn’t talk during the short drive back home. Marcus glanced at me every now and then like he wanted to check that I hadn’t mysteriously combusted. Occasionally, he reached for me but faltered mid-gesture. He wasn’t as distant as earlier, but he wasn’t himself either. Just because I was a mess, that didn’t mean our fight had come to a conclusion.
After he got us to my apartment and I spent a whole hour moving about and not saying anything coherent, it was finally time to tell him about his mother. It was time to break his heart.
“Marcus,” I said, sitting next to him on the sofa.
I stroked his forearms while struggling to choose my words, then ignoring the ache in my throat, I found courage where I thought there was none.
“Isaac knows about us,” I started.
“And this got you in this state?” he asked with arched brows and half a smile.
“No. Let me say it,” I begged. If he interrupted me, I was afraid I wouldn’t dare to tell him. “I thought you considered accepting Julian Hudson’s deal partly because your father had threatened you in some way. So I asked my private investigator to run a check on Isaac. I thought if we could find some leverage on him, then maybe you wouldn’t have to let him make decisions on your behalf. I thought—”
“What have you done, Charlotte?”
“There’s no easy way to say it,” I murmured more to myself than to him.
At first, I didn’t notice it, but right before I spoke those last words, right before I gave him the news that his father should have given him twenty-two years ago, his face lost all emotion like it was petrified, and his eyes turned to ice.
“Marcus, your mother is alive.”
As he sprang to his feet, he didn’t let my hands go. He shoved at them. He stepped back, planting his feet wide apart and glaring like he had never glared at me before. The veins in his neck strained right beneath the layer of skin, and his fingers curled into stony balls by his sides.
“What right do you have to drag my mother into this?” he snarled.
“You knew?” I gasped.
“Of course, I fucking knew,” he roared and threw his arms in the air. “She’s my mother.”
“But you never said anything. When you talked about her, it was always in the past. I thought Isaac never told you. I thought—”
My head was swimming. My vision blurred. Had I just made a terrible mistake?
“Not even Isaac is that much of a monster. In fact, not saying anything about her was the only noble thing he has ever done. Then you come snooping around, looking for the goddamn truth. You can’t stop, can you? You have to know everything, all the time?”
Marcus
was angry, but not because he had been kept in the dark for over two decades. He was upset for reasons I could not fathom, and his rage was uncontrollable and completely untamable.
He stared me down with a glower so cold and so wrathful that right then, I could have been mistaken for his worst enemy. He pointed a finger at me and kept shaking his head, but he didn’t say another word.
Perhaps if I had known how grossly I would invade Marcus’s life, I would have never asked Tanner to run a check on Isaac.
“Marcus, please, I didn’t mean to—” I said in a small voice.
He didn’t listen. He didn’t even hear me.
I felt the wetness on my cheeks, but just as he couldn’t rein in his fury, I couldn’t control my tears. I pleaded, and I apologized. I tried to reach him, but as soon as my fingers connected with his arm, he shot back like I had burned him. I was not welcomed into his arms tonight.
“So you think I went behind your back, talking with the FBI, and now you are going behind mine, having me and my life investigated? Leave my mother out of it, Charlotte. Whatever mess we make, don’t bring her into it.”
“Marcus, I never tried to—”
“Just—I’ve had enough for today.”
He ran a hand over his face and cast me a last glance of disappointment, grief, and accusation, then he bolted for the door like breathing the same air I did suffocated him.
“Marcus, please, don’t leave like this.”
He slammed the door so hard that it shuddered on its hinges. The blast echoed like thunder, then silence settled in heavy, bitter, and taunting.
I remained motionless in the middle of the room for a long time after Marcus left. The world spun, then it finally slowed down. My lungs were working, but I couldn’t breathe properly, and the tightness in my chest felt like a giant rock that dragged me down.
When I finally moved, I realized that my phone was ringing, first my mother, then Christina, even my father. I turned it off and curled up on the sofa. With my knees to my chest and my face buried in the cushions, I told myself that everything would be alright. The storm would pass. The disappointment and betrayal in Marcus’s eyes would disappear. He would understand. And eventually, the pulsing pain in my chest would subside.
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