The Billionaire Bundle

by Michele De Winton

  Helen’s spine stiffened as her mother’s gaze slipped to her stomach area and she frowned. “I don’t want to pry, sweetheart, but you both seemed so happy…”

  Helen sighed, her shoulders felt very heavy. “It’s so complicated. I love him, Mum, in spite of everything. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help it and you going on about wanting a baby around isn’t making me feel any better about it all.”

  “You’d tell Ricardo if you were though, wouldn’t you?” her mother asked gently. “He’d have a right to know.”

  “He wouldn’t be interested, believe me, Mum. It’s not his first if you get my meaning.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Marshall winced awkwardly. “Oh I see…well at least you two were married.”

  They still were legally.

  “And I wouldn’t trap him like that even if I was pregnant,” Helen said quickly. “If we had an accident he’d just think I was after his money.”

  “Perhaps you should make an appointment at the clinic just to be on the safe side, to make sure—”

  “I’m not pregnant, okay?” At least she was as sure as she could be that she wasn’t. All the signs were that she was about to have the period from hell any minute now. Sore breasts, bloating, headache, tearfulness… And it was better that way, she told herself firmly. Ricardo was finished with her and already had an inconvenient heir. It was over. This is the last thing you’re getting from me were his last words to her and she was sure he’d meant it. “It’s bad enough having a failed marriage behind me so soon anyway, let alone an unplanned pregnancy.” She wiped her eyes with the tissue her mum gave her. “Dad would hit the roof.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “He’d be pretty angry.”

  “He’s sad that you’ve split up with Ricardo, but he’d never be cross about a baby.”

  Helen’s father may have taken the news quietly, but Helen knew he was disappointed. He had always been one to keep his feelings to himself on delicate matters and Helen couldn’t work out if it was her or Ricardo he was most angry with. The phone began to ring at the other end of the house and once her mother had gone to answer it, her mind began to wander. Her parents had never said as much, but Helen knew they had yearned for sons, to help out with the farm, to continue the work of generations. Helen knew she couldn’t cope with running a large farm on her own. Thank goodness she wasn’t pregnant.

  …

  “I’m afraid I have bad news,” Mr. Marshall announced three hours later as the lunchtime dishes were being cleared away. “Bob Hargreaves popped over during morning milking to tell me. He’s selling up Pinkmead and the other two farms adjoining us are about to sign it all away too.” He puffed out his cheeks and rubbed his eyes under his spectacles. “So, girls…it’s just us left.” He stood abruptly and Helen’s heart turned over painfully as she saw his bottom lip twitch. “I’ll be off to the calves now.”

  Helen exchanged a glance with her mother. He left the house and they watched as his old rounded shoulders seemed to shrink a little more as he trudged up the yard in the lashing rain. The strain of the troubled farm was beginning to show again.

  “Katie needs some TLC in the barn, if you could,” Mrs. Marshall said in her most stiff upper-lipped way. “All those new kittens are wearing her out. Would you mind popping up to check on her?”

  “Will do,” Helen said softly, knowing that her mum needed a private, dignified moment alone. She wondered if she might cry. She’d never seen her mum weep, but things had never seemed quite as hopeless as this before.

  The barn was warm and dry at least when she reached it, a safe haven from the elements and the sweet smelling hay bales muffled the clatter of rain on the corrugated iron roof. Helen crouched to pick up a tiny squirming ball of fur and its high-pitched mew made her feel even more tearful. She set the tiny, warm and defenceless kitten back down into its cardboard box nest. It had been lined with an old red blanket and Katie the cat closed her yellow eyes for a moment as Helen stroked her head. “Thank you for letting me hold him,” she whispered. “He’s perfect.” Her hand dropped to her stomach. She felt an all too familiar ache, then she heard something fall with a soft thump to the floor.

  “Hello, Helen.” The voice behind her was unmistakeable.

  Ricardo.

  Helen scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding louder and faster than the rain on the barn’s roof. She spun round and stared at him, cold with shock. “What’s happened to you?”

  He was unshaven, hair matted to his head, raindrops trickling over his sharp cheekbones, glistening against the stubble on his jaw. Dressed in a black leather jacket and black jeans, his white T-shirt was splattered with mud and his breath formed short bursts of mist in the damp air.

  “It’s disgusting out there, if you hadn’t noticed. Your bloody farmyard is covered in crap and I’ve been running.”

  “Running?” Helen said, suddenly seeing the funny side of a dirty Ricardo Almanza, but feeling instinctively wary. He had no good reason for being there. “I didn’t think you’d know how. Don’t you have people for that sort of indignity?”

  “Funny,” he growled, brushing away some barley straw that had latched on to the soaked denim of his jeans.

  Helen’s heart sank when his volcanic expression registered and any levity of the situation evaporated. His eyes flashed in a way she’d not seen since their wedding day, when he’d lashed Jerardo Capella away from her. This was one angry hulk of Spanish male. But, of course, how stupid of her. He was there because of the marina, because of Primrose Farm, nothing to do with his runaway sham wife. This was the last piece of his corporate puzzle, his bankers bonus. He’d come to end it once and for all.

  Well, she could do angry as well and was now growing too furious and protective to be intimidated by him. It was just the two of them there and if she had to fight like an alley cat to save what she had left then she would. She’d beaten him up once before, after all.

  “We have unfinished business,” Ricardo said coldly.

  “Come to wield the fatal blow, have you? I guess you’ve brought the marriage contract addendum for me to sign? And now we’re the only farm left fighting you’ve come to finish that off too. In person.” Helen clamped her teeth together to stop herself shaking before she continued. “Well, let me tell you this, Almanza, we’re not going without a fight and if it has to be dirty one, then bring it on.”

  “I’ve come for my wife and child.”

  Helen felt her limbs turn to stone as he ran a shaking hand through the ink black shock of hair plastered to his forehead. His wedding ring glinted in the grey light that filtered through a dusty cobwebbed window.

  “You’ve what?”

  “I waited as long as I could before coming. I’ve been holed up in London since you got back here, like a cat on a hot tin roof waiting for the phone to ring.”

  “In London?”

  “I had to be somewhere close, so that I could get here within a couple of hours when the time was right. Your mother said you needed time to get your head together, to decide what you really wanted without being influenced, so I should stay away. But what she said today was just too much.”

  “My mother? You’ve been talking to each other behind my back?”

  “We spoke on the phone soon after you got back and she gave me the tongue lashing of a life time. Dios! I thought Lucia was bad! Berated me for abandoning my responsibilities, called me things that would make a pimp blush—”

  “So, let me get this straight. My mum told you I was pregnant?” Helen shook her head in disbelief. “Talk about interfering…”

  “She couldn’t stop herself from telling me when I rang this morning, and it was the last straw. Why I couldn’t wait any longer. Your mother didn’t betray you. She wants what’s best for you, that’s all. She was protecting you.”

  Helen’s brain was racing. “Look there’s been a misunderstanding. You really didn’t need to come.”

  “Didn’t ne
ed to come? This is our child we’re talking about! Why would I want to miss a second of my baby?”

  “Because you’ve done it all before?” Her voice sounded brittle. She felt brittle.

  “What?”

  “Pirro?” Helen said bitterly. “Remember him? Your son and heir?”

  “Pirro isn’t mine!”

  “Oh I see, so whose is he then? Jerardo Capella sneaked in and gave your girlfriend one while you were out on business, did he? Or don’t you really care who his real father is, just as long as you’re not landed with the inconvenience, the responsibility!”

  Ricardo took a step towards her, his hands tense, jaw set. Helen could see the veins on his hands.

  “Pirro is…” Ricardo shook his head from side to side, as if he was attempting to control his temper. “Pirro is my brother’s son, my nephew. I love him, obviously, but he is not my son! If I’d thought for one minute you’d thought that—”

  Helen was in such a state of shock that she couldn’t think anything for a few moments and couldn’t find her voice before he continued.

  “Listen, I have no doubt I’m the father of this child.” He paused and exhaled silently as she shook her head. “So we need to deal with all this sensibly.”

  Helen slumped down onto a bale of hay, her legs weak and shaky. Sensible, yes, she needed to be sensible. Sensible was good.

  “I can help you clean up, Helen, before it’s too late. We can make a go of this, fix everything.”

  “Clean up?” Helen frowned with annoyance. “Are you trying to be funny? I live on a farm for goodness sake. Besides, look at you!”

  “Don’t be difficult, you know what I’m talking about. I’ve already booked a suite in one of the best Swiss clinics. It will work out just fine, I know it.”

  “Ricardo, have you gone quite mad?”

  “The drugs, Helen, all the stuff that used to go on in here.” He gestured around them with both arms, his movements jerky. It wasn’t like him. She’d never seen him on the verge of losing control. “You’ll have the best specialists, nobody need ever know.”

  “This is ridiculous. The only drug I’ve ever used is Acetaminophen…” She leant back against a wall of rough straw and raised her eyes to the spidery rafters, she suddenly felt very tired. “I’ve never moved in your sort of circles, Ricardo. It’s not my world. The first champagne I ever tasted was with you. Why on earth do you think I’m a user?”

  “Kat Humby told me you were.”

  “I should have guessed. So you took her word for it? Thanks a lot! You really are a stupid—”

  “I tried talking to you about it, that last night in Menorca. You didn’t deny it so what was I supposed to think? And you were behaving irrationally, you said some hurtful things.”

  “You hurt me too…and I’d drunk too much on an empty stomach.”

  “I didn’t want to believe what she’d told me, found it hard to, but the facts were being thrown in my face and it all started to make sense.”

  “It did? Care to share these ‘facts’? This I have got to hear!”

  “Very well. First there’s the money. Drugs would be a reason why you needed so much, so quickly and why you wouldn’t elaborate on what your ‘bills’ were.”

  “It’s still none of your business, but I’m telling you now it wasn’t drug money!”

  “I know where it went now, Helen. Your mum told me everything, about how you paid off all their debts.” His expression was pained. “You could have told me, I wouldn’t have judged.”

  “Oh Mother!” Helen was totally exasperated with the pair of them now. “So much for discretion! Dad’s such a proud, private man, I don’t think he could stand it if—”

  “He knows that I know.”

  “Did you tell them how I got all that money as well?” Unable to look him in the face she saw him nod from the corner of her eye. “Oh God, they’ll be so ashamed.”

  Ricardo touched her lightly on the elbow, just enough to reassure her and then let his hand drop. “They’re humbled, proud that you’d marry someone you didn’t love just to help them. They love you in spite of and because of that. But getting back to the ‘facts’, our last evening together—”

  “Do we have to?” She was beginning to feel shivery.

  “Yes, we do. You were behaving as if you were coming down off a high, as if you needed a fix but couldn’t get one, which made sense because you were out of touch with your dodgy Ibiza friends, your supply.”

  “Oh, not Bjorn again! You’re obsessed with the poor man. Being gay wasn’t enough to get the poor guy off the hook. You had to make him my imaginary dealer! Bjorn’s body is a temple to all things organic and vegetarian, darling, he doesn’t even smoke!”

  “I admit I don’t like him, he makes me feel…jealous.”

  Helen couldn’t help letting out a small laugh. “Mad dog Almanza.”

  “And then you got really agitated about losing your handbag.” He gestured behind him to a brown heap in the corner. “I suddenly realized that you took it everywhere with you, even to the fire at Tino’s, and when I offered to replace it and its contents you didn’t want to. Why is that, Helen? What do you keep in there that’s so crucial? What’s in there that my money can’t, or won’t, buy if it’s not illegal drugs?”

  Helen stood up and stared at the handbag on the floor. She’d heard it drop to the floor before she’d realized he was there. “You found it.”

  “I went looking for it after we argued. I had to take Antonella back to Mahon. The last thing I wanted was for her to make matters even worse by her hanging around, and then I searched until it got dark. I used the torch I keep in the car until I found it. By the time I returned you were gone. I waited for you, stayed awake all night, but you never came back.”

  “You’d said it was over between us. I assumed I wasn’t going to see you again anyway.” She shrugged, still staring at the bag. “What was the point in me hanging on? I caught the next flight home.”

  “I had to phone your parents in the end just to make sure you were safe, and not in a ditch somewhere. They wanted to know what had happened, of course, so I told them.”

  Helen solemnly looked at the feet. “So what did you think once you’d gone through my handbag?”

  “I’ve never opened it.”

  “Then there’s no time like the present.” She marched over to the bundle of brown leather and thrust it under his nose. “Go on, open it!”

  “No, it makes no difference to how I feel about you.”

  “Then I’ll do it!” She ripped open the zip and tipped the entire contents on the ground. Lipstick, sunglasses and mints fell with a clatter, tampons rolled, tissues and assorted bits of paper floated after them. “There you go! Satisfied now?”

  Ricardo stooped to pick up two L-shaped plastic containers, one brown, one blue. “I had no idea.”

  “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “But why not? You should have told me in case—”

  “My asthma’s perfectly well controlled as long as I take the brown inhaler twice a day and have the blue one with me at all times in case I have an attack. The pollen on the hill was bad that day, and the pines were in flower and Lucia’s cat had been on our bed again.”

  “And those things set it off?”

  “I’m allergic to them, so yes, but I was also very angry and emotional. I was going to need the blue one soon, I could just tell. That’s why I was so anxious and irritable. And wheezy. Bloody marvelous state of affairs for a farmer’s daughter, isn’t it?”

  “For God’s sake, why the big secret? There must be millions of asthmatics in the world.”

  “I hate being labeled, really hate it. I don’t want people to think I want their sympathy, I don’t. I’m fine most of the time, so nobody needs to know, nobody has a reason to bully me either.”

  “Let me guess, Kat Humby bullied you because of this?”

  “And her gang of posh friends. They had a lovely time, because I wore Nation
al Health free glasses until I was sixteen too. And braces on my teeth.”

  “You’d never guess to look at you now.”

  “Nope, my teeth are straight and I saved up for eye surgery to fix them. Unfortunately, all the money in the world can’t buy me better lungs.”

  He pushed a hand deep into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry for accusing you of using drugs. It was stupid of me to come to such a wild conclusion based on, based on nothing more than me being irrational. And believing a mad woman’s poisonous lies.”

  Helen straightened her shoulders. She had the upper hand now. “So you might be able to get this farm from us with all your millions and your gang of lawyers, but you’re not going to paint me as an addict to take the baby you think I’m carrying.”

  Ricardo’s eyes opened wide and his mouth fell open. “You think I’m capable of that?”

  “Yes, Ricardo. Yes I do and why shouldn’t I after everything you’ve done so far? You and your sneaky subsidiaries have cut quite a swathe through the landscape here. We both know Primrose Farm is the last property left on the peninsula that you’ve not gotten your hands on and that we can’t fight you much longer.” She threw her arms in the air with desperation. “I wish you’d deny it all, Ricardo. I wish you could say that all this buying of land isn’t down to Lidia Skiptree and you.”

  “I’ve only ever known her as Humby, Kat Humby. I didn’t realize she’d changed her name and that she’d bought a stake in Fothergill Enterprises.” His expression darkened. “So, I had no idea my company was involved with hers, either, until I started investigating this marina project while I was in London this week.”

  Helen didn’t try to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “Really?”

  “Really! She pulled the wool over a lot of people’s eyes trying to get close to me again, but she’s out of a job now and the police will be knocking on her door very soon. So not only is she a bully, Helen, she’s also a stalker.”

  “Bloody hell…”

  “It’s true. She tried to seduce me into having sex with her at a property conference in London a few years back. It wasn’t hard turning her down, believe me, there are limits even when it is being handed to you on a plate. But she couldn’t let it go.”