by Nikki Logan
If he’d said anything else...any other word...
‘What do you mean?’ The question bled out of him. So maybe at least one part of him was still looking for evidence.
‘You won’t mean to. You won’t know quite how it happened. But one day you’ll have her toothbrush in your cabinet and her brand of milk in your fridge.’
‘That doesn’t sound too sinister.’ It actually sounded weirdly good. For a half a heartbeat.
‘She’s like one of those spiders that lures you in with the pretty exoskeleton and the seductive dance and then, once she’s got you, wham, not so pretty and not so seductive any more.’
He couldn’t really imagine either of those things. ‘She doesn’t strike me as the black widow type.’
‘I’m talking about the tears and the neediness that start.’
Needy. Hadn’t he used the exact same word himself, earlier? Aiden stared at Jardine and wondered if this was how he came across to strangers. Or, worse, to people he knew.
Maybe to Tash.
‘Classic bait and switch, mate,’ Jardine said, turning for the bar. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’
No. He was saying so much more, and he was probably saying it to everyone here. Suddenly those eyes following Tash around the room didn’t seem so benign. He scanned the venue, found Jardine’s date drinking it up at the second bar and reached for his phone.
He and Carles had at least two mutual friends. One of them was bound to owe him a favour.
Within ten minutes, Carles was shoving her mobile phone back into her purse and copping an earful from a very unhappy Jardine as they moved towards the exit. He couldn’t really stay without his date and she’d just received an urgent phone call from her marketing department....
Unfortunate, but necessary, she’d gushed.
Aiden had just smiled and held the door for them both.
As he turned back to the room he caught the tail end of Tash’s glance. Her relief was patent and he knew, without asking, that Jardine had likely been enjoying taunting her with his presence.
‘Jerk,’ he muttered.
‘I hope that wasn’t for me, darling,’ a familiar voice said from behind him.
He turned into the warmth of a familiar smile. ‘Mother.’
‘Well, I’m here. I hope this will be worth it,’ she announced. It had been years since Laura Moore had been to any of MooreCo’s events. The ribbon-cutting for the Terrace high-rise was probably the last. Corporate parties, unlike dinner ones, just weren’t his mother’s forte. She didn’t do well with all that pressure and no formal role to play.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he murmured, kissing her cheek. Though his purpose for asking wasn’t quite as solid now as it had been at eight o’clock this morning. This morning he’d believed that his mother’s presence might help to remind Tash that Nathaniel Moore had a loving wife to go home to. That there was a marriage about to be wrecked. And it might help his father, too, to have them in the same room at the same time. For the same reasons.
Maybe that was all he needed to be cured of this obsession he seemed to have.
Insidious. An ugly word from an ugly human being but he just couldn’t shake it. Tash had certainly wheedled her way dangerously close to out of his bad books, which was quite an achievement given how in them she’d been when he first walked into her studio.
He furnished his mother with something from the bar, topped up his own glass and then turned to search out his father.
‘Who’s your father talking to?’
Aiden’s heart shrivelled to half its size as his eyes followed the direction of his mother’s enquiry, but then plumped out again as he realised it wasn’t Tash. ‘Margaret Osborne. The wife of—’
‘Trevor Osborne, yes, I recognise her now. Goodness, the years haven’t been kind.’
Every part of him cringed at the slightly too-loud tenor of her voice. Guess that was what came of being out of the scene for so long—she’d lost her social skills when it came to business matters. Though he couldn’t even imagine her working a room quite as fearlessly as Tash, even at the top of her game.
He shepherded his mother across the crowded room until they caught his father’s eye. It widened with alarm—as well it might....
‘Laura?’
She leaned in for an air kiss—so she hadn’t completely forgotten how to be Mrs Nathaniel Moore—and then smiled at her husband’s surprise. ‘I know. I’m as flummoxed to be here as you are seeing me. Your junior partner invited me.’
His father seemed about as discomposed as Aiden had ever seen him. ‘You’re always invited, Laura. You know that.’ Dark eyes scanned the room and then flared even further.
‘Nathaniel, should we—?’ Tash appeared by Aiden’s side and then jerked to a halt at the immediate tension in his father’s body language. ‘Oh, I’m sorry for interrupting.’
She turned her curiosity to his mother, who stood politely blank-faced.
His father quite literally couldn’t speak.
‘Laura Moore,’ his mother finally said, introducing herself on a smile, her dark brows slightly folded in. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m—’ Tash opened her mouth to speak but both men rushed to cut her off.
‘The guest of honour,’ Nathaniel said.
‘Natasha’s here with me,’ Aiden blurted, simultaneously. The surprise Tash turned on him very neatly matched his own. Why the hell had he said that? Was it because inviting his mother here tonight suddenly seemed like the worst idea ever?
Or was it because he didn’t want to be proved correct all of a sudden?
‘Oh, you’re the artist?’ Laura covered for both her momentarily inept men. ‘Nathaniel has brought home photographs of your work. Just lovely.’
Tash smiled and Aiden recognised it instantly as her game-face smile. The one she’d been feeding everyone here. The one she’d used with him the first few times they met. The fact that she couldn’t be genuinely polite to the wife of her biggest commissioner instantly brought his suspicion screaming back to the fore.
Why not—what did she have to lose? Or hide?
But her answer gave nothing away. ‘Thank you, Mrs Moore.’
‘Please, call me Laura.’
That offer seemed to actually pain Tash, but she kept the fake smile glued to her face. Was he the only one who could see how it paled just slightly at the corners?
His own frown deepened until it must have matched his mother’s.
‘Have we met?’ Laura queried. ‘You seem so familiar....’
‘I don’t think so,’ Nathaniel cut in. ‘Perhaps in the newspapers?’
‘Perhaps.’ She pressed steepled fingers to her lips and it was the first time his mother had struck him as old. But compared to the golden, smooth skin of the woman by her side, the wrinkles on his mother’s hands cried out with obviousness. ‘Never mind, it will come to me.’
‘A drink, Laura?’ Nathaniel asked.
Everyone’s eyes went instantly to the glass of wine already in his wife’s hands. Okay, it was official...he’d never seen his father this ruffled.
‘Tash has quite a rare talent,’ Aiden murmured, to cover his father’s gaffe. He’d wanted to throw the spectre of ‘the wife’ in between Tash and his father, not cause his mother any further pain, and his father’s sputtering was only going to pique her curiosity and have her asking questions she might not like the answer to. ‘Her work is going to make such a statement at the entrance to MooreCo.’
Tash turned her surprise to him. ‘Thank you, Aiden. I think that might be the first nice thing you’ve said about me.’
‘Your work is beautiful,’ he hedged.
She laughed. Right when he expected her lips to purse up tight. ‘I’ll still take it. I get the feeling praise is a ra
re thing from you.’
His mother’s eyes immediately honed in on her, and immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. Or the right one given he’d just, stupidly, declared her to be his date. She turned positively conspiratorial. ‘He’s a Moore, Natasha. You could die waiting for a pleased word....’
Tash’s laugh-lines immediately reconfigured into a complicated little cluster of confusion. Perhaps it was easier for her to do what she was doing if she imagined that Laura Moore was a cold, distant wife.
Far from the truth.
Certainly his father seemed unable to countenance them speaking directly to each other.
‘Perhaps it’s time for the speeches, Tash?’
She turned, bestowed the only genuine smile of the night on his father and then excused herself. As soon as both of them began making their way towards the small stage, his mother rounded on him. ‘An artistic type, Aiden? That’s very un-you.’
There was a reason for that. ‘Perhaps I just don’t meet arty types, usually.’
‘She seems very sweet.’
‘That would be very un-me. Besides, how would you know? The two of you barely spoke a word.’
‘I don’t need to converse with her to know. I could practically feel the electricity coming off the pair of you.’
Or perhaps she was just misreading the source of whatever she’d sensed. Maybe the sparks were the energy zinging back and forth between Tash and his father. And maybe that was what caused the apparent short fuse in his father’s brain.
‘Bring her for dinner.’
Into his parents’ home? Uh, no. Not going to happen.
The lights around them dimmed, triggering a reluctant hush to fall over the liquored-up crowd. His father stepped up onto stage, drawing Tash in his wake. She stood right on the edge of the lit area of the stage, polite and demure but impossible to take your eyes off. Even doing nothing, she was intriguing. The blonde flare of her hair, the single streak of perfectly positioned, artistically oriented burgundy sweeping down across her smooth forehead. Artful smudges around her eyes and very little else on the intelligent face focused entirely on his father. And then the open expanse of creamy shoulders and chest above the patterned bustier that kept her cleavage firmly restrained behind a zip. The light fairly glowed off her unmarked skin and it was all too easy imagining lowering that convenient zip to see if the skin beneath was as pristine.
‘The light favours her,’ his mother whispered, her gaze correctly tracking his to its destination.
It galled him to hear her compliment the woman who was stealing her husband’s focus. He pressed his lips together and forced his attention off the woman practically glowing on-stage and onto his father. ‘I think she just knows how to use it,’ he murmured.
‘It’s not like your father to be so discomposed. Perhaps it’s because I’m here? Or perhaps he has some secret lover tucked away behind the scenes?’
Aiden laughed where he was supposed to—a tight, short chuckle—and focused on his father’s face. The tense, formal man before them wasn’t a shade of the relaxed, casual man of a few hours ago. Of just ten minutes ago. It contrasted awkwardly with the beautiful, flowing images of Tash’s glass design glowing on the big screen behind him.
‘...and so, without further ado, I give you the creative spirit behind MooreCo’s newest acquisition—’ he took a long breath in, found his wife in the darkened crowd and braved her curious stare ‘—Natasha Sinclair.’
The audience’s burst of applause almost drowned out his mother’s gasp, but Aiden felt it in the stiffening of her body where it pressed against his side in the crush. He tore his eyes from Tash long enough to look down on his mother’s pale face. Her lips made a straight, devastated line in her face but her eyes were busy, flicking back and forth between her husband and his ingénue.
Tash started speaking, and her disarming cadence had the audience enraptured as she described the creative intent behind her thalassic theme, but it did nothing to lessen the tension pouring off his mother. He turned with her as her body spun away and he hurried to follow her outside.
‘Mum...?’
Something major was going on. Something he was starting to wish he understood before the flawed brilliance of inviting his mother here tonight.
‘I take it back,’ she choked, hurrying down the steps to the old building. ‘Do not bring that woman to dinner.’
That woman. He’d heard that phrase before. When no one knew he was listening. But Tash would have been a little girl when that phrase was first whispered between his mother and her siblings. She simply couldn’t be that woman.
‘What’s going on, Mum?’
‘Was it not bad enough twenty years ago?’ she half raged. ‘Now he brings her back into our lives this way through her cheap daughter. God, I knew I recognised her from somewhere....’
He reached out and caught his mother by the arm. ‘Calm down. Stop. Tell me what the problem is.’
‘I’ll tell you exactly who the problem is, Aiden.’ Her chest rose and fell with pained regularity. ‘It’s your date.’
She peered up at him with the kind of motherly authority and blatant agony that no son could stomach. ‘Natasha?’
‘Did you know who she was when you asked me along tonight?’
Guilt raged from cell to cell in his body. He had brought her here tonight to shake things up a bit. But he’d had no idea that he was setting his mother up for this kind of hurt. And, deep down, he didn’t believe that his father and Tash had done anything wrong. Yet. Certainly not enough to be upsetting his mother to this degree.
‘She’s Natasha Sinclair. An artist—’ he started.
The snort of derision was immediate and unfamiliar in his genteel mother and it morphed into a half-sob. ‘She may be a Sinclair, but she’s also a Porter.’
FOUR
‘“He knew my mother...”’ Aiden snarled, shunting Tash back into the tiny coat-filled room with his big body. He slammed the door on prying ears and locked it.
She literally recoiled from the ugly accusation in his handsome face and shrugged back a few more inches into the protection of the expensive coats all around her. ‘Aiden, what—?’
‘We had a fifteen-minute wait for the taxi I called because Mum was too hysterical to drive. She shared the whole sordid story. All about your mother’s affair with my father. I never would have invited her if I’d known.’
‘Is she all right?’
His lips flattened. ‘No. You do not get to play the gracious innocent party. Her sister is en route to meet her at home and try and repair the damage you’ve done here tonight.’
‘I’ve done? You invited her.’
‘You hunted us down. Forced your way into my family’s lives. None of this would have happened if not for that.’
‘That’s not what—’
But he wasn’t listening. Of course he wasn’t. He was a Moore. ‘In my family we know her as Porter,’ he barged on. ‘Why?’
The he-man thing was getting old. Tash stood up taller and gained some return ground on him. ‘In your family she was a pariah, and you lot made her life miserable!’ she hissed. ‘Porter was her maiden name. That’s what they knew her as at uni.’
‘University? But that was years before.’
‘That’s how they met. They were all in the same year. My mother and yours. They were friends.’
‘Friends?’ That took him aback. ‘I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at your behaviour, then, if that’s the kind of treacherous stock you come from.’
She stepped up to him hard. Peered up into all that anger and ignored the cheap, ugly shot at her. ‘Your father cheated, too.’
‘Oh, I have a whole other conversation waiting for him, don’t you worry. This is about you.’
‘Why? I was seven yea
rs old when they...’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word. Affair. Besides, did the word even apply if it was only one weekend? Although deep down she knew that their love affair had gone on for decades regardless of only being together the once.
He glared down on her. ‘Guilty by association. Why are you in our lives now? Why suddenly emerge?’
‘Because she died, Aiden. And she died still loving your father.’ She swallowed back the choke. ‘I just wanted to know the man that held her heart all these years.’
He struggled with that news. ‘Why stir it all up?’
‘I wasn’t stirring anything. I only wanted to meet him, talk to him. Try to get some closure for both of them. You were the one that forced the issue of the commission and dragged me into your lives. You were the one that brought your mother here tonight and ripped the decades-old scab off it all.’
He didn’t look as if her being right made the truth any easier to swallow. He practically scraped around for an out and found it in picking a fight. ‘You looked at her like you didn’t like her.’
‘Why would I like the woman that helped make my mother’s life a misery? Why would I like any of you? You Moores trashed the Porter name any chance you got. She was practically ostracised from her community because of you all.’
He glared down on her. ‘Leave me out of it. I was the same age as you.’
‘Right. So neither of us was responsible—we’re just left picking up the pieces.’
He so looked as if he wanted to keep arguing but the logic of her argument was hard to refute. His nostrils flared twice before his body sagged. ‘You just wanted to meet him?’
‘I needed to. Her diaries were full of him. I wanted to give them both that closure.’
‘That’s why he’s so obsessed with you?’
It hit her then. Exactly why Aiden Moore thought she was spending so much time around his father. ‘Isn’t it bad enough you thought I was chasing him? Now you think we were actually on together?’ The thought would have been vaguely disturbing if not for the obvious truth. ‘I’m a shadow of an obsession. A last chance at something he once wanted so badly.’