by Nikki Logan
His voice…
Her tears eased a fraction.
She reached behind her and pulled her mobile from her pocket. It might as well have weighed a tonne for all the strength her fingers had. It took only a second to pick up her voicemail.
‘Iz. It’s me…I’ve been called back to Australia effective immediately. Family emergency.’ She tried not to respond to the strained anxiety in his voice. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. My flight leaves at four. Call me if you get this message in time.’
That was it.
Not, ‘My father’s had a heart attack, Iz.’
No, ‘I’m going to be lost without you, Iz.’
Absent of, ‘I’ll miss you, Iz.’
She played the message again. And then again. Nothing about the simple message changed. But on the last play it automatically began the second message in her queue.
‘God, sorry…’ Just listening to his accent it hurt. ‘My head’s all over the place. I wanted to see you, but I have to get back for the girls. They’re beside themselves. Mum’s pretty useless in a crisis and they…’ His sigh was deep and mournful. ‘They need their brother.
‘I’ll come back to you as soon as I can. There’s something I need to tell you. And something I have for you. Keep me in your thoughts, Izzy. I love you, Quickdraw. I’ll miss you.’
Beep.
Something deep in her chest swelled to overflowing. Until it ached. His words were so simple, yet so heartfelt. So rich with frustration and grief and hope and loss. And with love.
Harry Mitchell loved her.
An hour ago, anyway.
The thing spreading in her chest curled back into a tight fist.
When you hear it you can disregard the whole message…
All of it.
The flare of panic as he remembered his message, then the dead nothing in his eyes as he’d said those awful words… What did he mean by ‘all of it’? The intimate, affectionate tone? The concern for her feelings?
The love part?
What had changed? She’d come to him. She’d run to him. Despite all her misgivings about his motives, she went where he needed her. By his side.
She played the message again.
It didn’t hurt any less.
But pain was at least better than the big, empty, lonely void she feared she’d be left with where Harry had just vacated.
She lifted the phone again but this time she pressed different keys. Doing something she should have had the courage for much, much sooner.
Her eyes stung as it rang and then they fluttered shut as it answered.
‘Mum?’ she whispered. ‘I need you…’
TWELVE
Even the best room in the best Australian hospital was too pedestrian for Weston Broadmore. The moment his father was released from Intensive Care, he relocated, bringing an entourage of nurses and specialists and a swathe of security personnel home with him. The whole upstairs wing now looked like a military operation.
His father was doing okay, but the media were salivating over the story like starved dogs: finance baron irreparably broken, young heir steps out of the shadows to take up the reins. Not that anyone had said that aloud, but the whole world knew that seventy-nine-year-old Weston Broadmore might have survived but wasn’t going to be running his company, personally, any longer.
‘You look pretty miserable for someone who just inherited a billion-dollar empire.’ The soft voice came from behind him in the hallway. He turned into the warm brush of lips on his cheek.
‘Carla.’ His oldest sister. His favourite.
His role model. The woman who’d overcome a misogynist’s ignorance—and his disbelief—to work her way up to a high-ranking job in her father’s company.
‘This is not how I imagined it all happening,’ he murmured, staring into the makeshift triage, where people in blue scrubs buzzed quietly around his father like bees around a queen.
She squeezed his shoulder. ‘Your ascension to the throne? How did you imagine it?’
‘I was older.’ Much older. With a wife and kids. Tall, willowy kids. ‘And everyone was much more warm and fuzzy about it all.’
‘Warm and fuzzy?’ Carla’s snort brought one of the nurses’ critical gazes around to where they were standing. ‘You did grow up in this family, right?’
‘This family is not just about one man any more than this company is. There’s plenty of potential for warm and fuzzy in our branch of the family tree.’
Him. His sisters. No shortage of love and loyalty there, even if they’d never really been encouraged to be huggy about it.
‘I think you forget who fathered us. And mothered.’
No. It took a special kind of hardness to tie yourself to a man like Weston Broadmore for life. Harry knew how trapped he’d felt his whole life by the weighty expectations on him as heir. And he’d been watching his mother closely since he got back. Looking for signs of relief. Ambition. But only finding pinches of anxiety around her eyes. For her husband or for her future?
‘Lord only knows the kind of strength it takes to live in a loveless marriage where your every move is scrutinised.’
Even if you’d engineered it yourself.
Carla stared. ‘What did you do in London? You’ve come back quite changed.’
‘I watched. And I absorbed. Learned.’
‘From who, the Dalai Lama?’
Immediately his mind betrayed him and went straight to Izzy. His gut squeezed.
‘You sound just like him.’ He nodded towards the shrouded figure at the centre of all the nursing attention.
Carla grimaced. ‘God forbid.’
He turned and caught her eyes. ‘Listen—’
‘Don’t. I know what you’re going to say.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because it’s what I’d say if I was in your position. Dragged back from freedom to take the rudder. That you’re sorry our father is such a Neanderthal. That you’re sorry that he passed over every girl in the family to leave everything to the only boy.’
‘I am sorry, Carla.’
‘I know. Because you’re a good person. And because it’s not your fault Mum finally managed to make a Y chromosome.’
His eyes fell shut.
‘We’re proud of you, you know that? Me and Katie and Mags. Dad couldn’t see it but I knew what you were doing over there. We knew. And we were cheering for you every time you got promoted. On your own. No matter what happens you will always know you earned that fair and square.’
One thing in his life worked out, anyway.
‘And Dad will never, ever get it,’ Carla went on. ‘He’ll go to his grave being secretly surprised at the success you’re going to make of running the corporation but giving himself all the credit. But you are the man you are despite him, not because of him. Always believe that.’
He swallowed back any response. With a throat as thick as his and the week he’d just had he was liable to blurt out everything to his big sister. But he curled his fingers through hers and let their firm pressure do the talking.
They went back to watching the medical hustle and bustle.
‘Anyway,’ Carla sighed deeply, ‘I came up here for a reason, Harry. There’s someone here for you, in the study.’
He swore. ‘Another journalist? Let them wait.’
Carla watched him sideways. ‘Someone from the London office. Looking for a handover.’
The same London office that he’d lied to for five years? The London office who’d be thinking back over those years looking for the slightest offences they might be punished for when he took over the big seat. The same London office who’d be struggling right now after a week with no one at the helm of their finance department.
‘I guess I owe them that, at least.’
He followed his sister down the ornate, timber staircase and trailed her clicks across the expensive, polished floors. The same floors they used to slide along on pillowcases, back when the pillowcases we
re bigger than they were. And when both their parents were out.
Carla stopped just short of the study, kissed his cheek and excused herself quietly. ‘See you for lunch.’
Everything was whispers. Everywhere in the house.
As if they were mourning in anticipation.
He cleared his throat loudly by way of a butler’s introduction and pushed the study door open. Maybe he could get this done in an hour…
His feet stumbled to a halt.
Izzy stood, like some kind of mirage, in the last place he ever imagined seeing her. His father’s study. Glancing around at the opulence as if it were a foreign civilisation she’d just uncovered.
Every muscle in his body did the full fight-or-flight clench.
Except for his heart; that swelled to twice its size just for seeing her. In that split second before his mind recalled how he’d been played.
He beat it down with a club.
‘Thank you for seeing me, Harry.’
If he’d known it was her he wouldn’t have. Betrayal was cancerous enough inside you without having to look it in the eye, too. He took a moment to marshal his voice.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘You need me.’ Her tiny hands twisted in front of her, lost.
His pulse thundered. ‘No, I don’t. I’m getting by just fine.’
If ‘fine’ meant lying awake until he was too exhausted not to fall into a coma. And walking around this house as if he were a ghost, while everyone lived around him in a kind of parallel reality.
‘I don’t just mean now. I mean in life.’ She took one forward step. ‘You need me in your life.’
His enlarged heart pressed outwards on his ribcage until it threatened to crack.
‘What’s so special about you?’ he fought. Hating himself, but hating this life his parents led more. Fearing it more than anything. Still disgusted with himself that he’d let it happen to him.
She wavered just the tiniest bit but then rallied. ‘Last week I would have struggled to answer that question, but I’ve had thirty hours and ten thousand miles to think about it.’
‘And? What’s your verdict?’
‘I’m smart. And ethical. And kind. And loyal. But I’m far from perfect.’
He folded his arms tighter across his chest. If for no other reason than to hide his shaking fingers from her.
She’d already taken so much from him, she didn’t get to have that as well.
Izzy crossed to look out of the floor-to-ceiling window onto his mother’s extensive gardens, the Australian sun glowing clear through her pale dress. It silhouetted her body dramatically, until he had to move to the side of the room rather than let himself drown in memories of that lithe shape curled around him as they slept.
The last decent sleep he’d had.
‘I broke my father’s heart,’ she started. ‘The day he dropped me off at Trenton. I’d never seen him cry—ever—no matter how tough things got, financially, he always stayed strong. But he cried that day and I told myself it was just our parting but…it wasn’t.’ Her chest heaved. ‘I think I broke his heart.’
She turned and paced back across the study, arms curled around her middle. ‘He stood there, in front of our battered old car, and waved me off to the bright, new future I was so excited about. Me in my immaculate uniform that was the first new thing I’d ever worn. I couldn’t have moved up those stone stairs faster. I didn’t want anyone to see him or the car.’
Her sadness reached out and ebbed around his feet like London fog.
‘You were a kid,’ he defended before remembering he shouldn’t.
‘I rejected the life they’d struggled to give me. Like it wasn’t good enough. And every time I called home with stories of the great experiences I was having at school I compounded the hurt. And I could hear that in their voices. So…I just…stopped calling. I started emailing. Sometimes texting. Eventually nothing.’
She trailed one absent finger along his father’s desk.
‘I traded my life for a new one,’ she continued, voice rich with bitterness, ‘and never looked back. Because it hurt too much, knowing what I’d done to my own parents. People I loved. Hearing it in their voices; knowing that they let me drop virtually out of their lives because they wanted me to be happy. And because I’d managed to make them feel ashamed about our life, too.’
She took a deep breath.
Her dignified pain reached out to him in a way he’d never experienced with anyone. All the deeper because she was trying so hard to mask it.
His feet started moving before he realised what was happening but he caught himself on the opposite side of the desk. Gripped the edge as if his survival depended on it.
‘You flew halfway around the world to confess about your parents?’
She held his gaze. ‘I let my relationship with my parents wither and die rather than acknowledge my shame at how I’d abandoned them, their love, our life, for a better offer. I adapted, I compensated and made sure I was always distracted from the thoughts. And life was okay. Like living without a limb. It can be done.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She stepped around the desk—floated really—and Harry’s throat dried as he watched her.
‘I know I can do it with you, too. Just…let you go. I’m really practised at it. It won’t be easy but I’ll compensate, adapt. And life will be okay again, afterwards.’
The finality of her serious speech infected him. And the meaning of her words coiled like a snake in his guts. ‘Yet, here you are.’
‘Because I don’t want to let you go. Okay is no longer enough. I’m here to fight for what we had.’
‘Izzy, what we had is over,’ he gritted, more an affirmation for himself.
Her chest heaved in that insanely feminine dress. ‘And what if I disagree?’
‘Ending a relationship isn’t usually mutual. Someone walks. It’s over. That’s how it works.’
Flies, in his case. First class. Not that he’d noticed one bit of the comfort.
A smile tickled at the edges of her lips. It did what it never failed to: made his heart squeeze. Except this time the squeezing hurt. Because he’d been so crazy about that smile.
‘Yet, here I am,’ she said.
He took a long, fortifying breath. Refusing to be manipulated. ‘I’m sorry you wasted your time—’ and presumably money she didn’t have ‘—but nothing’s changed from the last time we spoke.’
He turned and left the room. And it near killed him to leave her behind.
‘One hour.’
After a week of whispers, Izzy’s English alfresco voice fairly rattled through the big old house. He stalled. Turned. Stared. Because—dear God—he wanted that to be true. Even if he knew it didn’t make any difference. He’d set his course now.
‘One hour,’ she repeated, dignified and strong. ‘That’s how long I’d known your secret when you left. Just one hour. And for most of that I was in a taxi trying to get to you.’
His breath lurched. But he’d been controlling his voice at management meetings way too long. He lifted one shoulder. ‘So you say.’
‘Name one time that I’ve lied to you.’
‘How would I know?’
‘I guess you wouldn’t. I could be as good at it as you.’ Her nostrils flared. ‘Would it help if I offered witness statements?’
‘Depends on the witnesses.’
‘Poppy and Tori.’
‘Those girls would die for you. I’m fairly sure they’d lie for you.’
‘You really don’t have a lot of faith in people, do you?’
Nope. He really didn’t.
Apparently, with good cause.
She looked around the massive study, at the expensive art on the walls. She walked to one piece and stared at it for eternity. ‘Is this where you grew up? This is normal to you?’
‘I told you, I spent most of my time at boarding school.’
‘But this is what waited for you wh
en you came home?’
What the hell was she getting at now? ‘Yes.’
‘And your friends?’
‘Of course, friends.’
‘And girlfriends?’
‘Izzy…’
‘I remember how awed I was by Trenton. The trappings of wealth.’
She looked pretty awed by the art on the wall. A smile fought at the corners of his mouth. ‘That’s an original McCubbin. Hardly a trapping.’
She twisted back to him, nodding with interest, but it only took a moment for it to devolve into a scrunched nose. ‘Actually, I don’t care. I’m not much into art. I’m just being polite.’
Something silvery and wormlike twisted out of the black mass that was his heart and brought a lightness with it that he hadn’t felt since London. But he fought it. Time to start winding this little reunion up. His patience was wearing thin and his resistance even thinner. He’d have to have her perfume scrubbed out of the walls as it was.
‘Is that right?’
She ceased her exploration of the wall art and crossed to stand right in front of him.
‘I can see why people might get dazzled by all this. Friends. Girlfriends.’ She watched him closely. ‘And how that might lead to some…bad situations for you.’
This close, he could see the evidence of the stresses of the past week much more clearly under her eyes. In the whiteness of her lips. He fought against the sense of triumph that she was doing as badly as he was. And not to care.
‘Whereas you’re entirely unmoved,’ he guessed.
She glanced around again. ‘It’s not really to my taste,’ she confessed.
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be to anyone’s taste, Izzy. It’s a statement of grandeur.’
‘That statement being how much it cost?’
His snort echoed like a dog bark through the halls. ‘Costs, present tense. This estate costs a fortune every year to run.’
‘Lucky you have several fortunes, then.’
Izzy’s quick mind was no less sexy than when he’d first met her, and he began to remember exactly why he’d fallen for her. Words had been foreplay between them from the very beginning.
So he withheld any more.
‘I had a lot of time to think after you left. Sitting there on the floor by your lift.’