Black Sheep Heir

by Yvonne Lindsay

  “You two look as if you’re in cahoots about something,” Miles said as he picked up his water glass and took a long pull at the icy liquid.

  “Miles, darling, Keith has brought something to my attention that I think you really need to hear.”

  It was the use of the word darling that did it. His mother wasn’t the kind of person to use terms of endearment.

  “Oh?” Miles said and looked straight at the older man across the table. “And that would be?”

  “No need to get your hackles up, boy,” Cooper said. “Your mother and I are merely looking after your interests.”

  His proprietary tone when he mentioned Ava and calling him a boy irritated Miles on a level he didn’t want to study too carefully. Instead, he put his game face on. The one he used when he was about to deliver serious news to one of his clients about their safety.

  “Perhaps you’d like to enlighten me?”

  “Now, Miles, don’t be defensive. Keith, tell him what you told me about Chloe.”

  Chloe? What did she have to do with Cooper?

  “Yes, Uncle Keith, How about you tell me.”

  Miles kept his barely banked irritation firmly under control.

  “Well,” Cooper started, reaching out a hand and taking hold of Ava’s as if to comfort her. “Your dad wasn’t always the best kind of man when it came to business.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Miles bit out.

  His father’s approach to business and Miles’s ethics had never been on the same page. It was what had driven him to make his own place in the world thirteen hundred miles away from where he’d been born and bred.

  Cooper nodded his head in acknowledgment. “There was a situation a little under twenty years ago where Trent behaved particularly badly. He entered into a verbal agreement with an acquaintance of his who was in the business of making aircraft seats and supplying them to private jet manufacturers.”

  Miles began to feel a creeping sense of uneasiness at the tale.

  “Sounds like a reasonable thing to do.”

  “Well, yes, it would have been. Except when this acquaintance of his invested heavily in the materials to supply WinJet exclusively, Trent decided to pull the plug on the arrangement. As they’d never entered into a written contract and only agreed to their partnership on a handshake, the poor guy didn’t have a leg to stand on. His suppliers started demanding payment for the stock he’d bought in anticipation of the WinJet job, which he obviously couldn’t pay for and he went bankrupt.

  “Trent just stood by and watched a man, who’d trusted him, dig himself deeper and deeper in debt, and when the guy was forced to walk away from his business, your father swooped in and bought the remains of the company out from under him and amalgamated it into WinJet, where it remains today.”

  Miles pursed his lips and considered what Keith had told him. None of it came as any surprise. It was just the kind of underhanded thing he knew his father was capable of. The man had always wanted to win at any cost and damn the consequences. Miles had long believed his father was devoid of any social conscience and had often wondered how his mother, who’d once been heavily involved in philanthropic works, had coped with that. But then again, he rationalized, maybe that’s why she’d worked so hard for charity—to offset his father’s less stellar attributes.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with Chloe.”

  “I’m getting to it. Just listen. After being let down by the very man who’d promised to grow his business and being made bankrupt, then seeing his company sell to the one person who could have prevented his downfall, the poor guy committed suicide.” Keith sighed heavily. “I went to his funeral. I’ll never forget seeing his wife and daughter. They were bereft. They’d not only lost their husband and father, they’d lost everything. He’d cashed up life insurances and cleared out his bank accounts all in a desperate attempt to keep his business afloat and to pay back his creditors. His name was John—” he paused before continuing “—John Fitzgerald. And his daughter’s name is Chloe.”

  Miles felt his stomach drop and the chill of arctic waters ran through his veins. His father had cheated Chloe’s dad?

  “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” he ground out when he could trust himself to speak. Miles looked at his mother, who looked equally shocked.

  “I didn’t know,” she uttered in a strangled whisper. “I would have done something, anything. I had no idea Trent had done something so vile. He never told me about the initial agreement, but I remember him being very smug about acquiring the aircraft seat manufacturing plant and absorbing it into WinJet.”

  “And I wasn’t certain until now,” Keith said, patting Ava comfortingly on her hand. “I thought Chloe looked familiar at the Fourth of July barbecue. You even heard me say as much. But she denied ever meeting any of us before she met you. Remember? So my questions to you, Miles, are, what’s her agenda and why is she keeping her family’s earlier involvement with us a secret?”

  Fourteen

  Chloe was rubbing her horse down and laughing at something Daniel had just said when she heard footsteps approaching the stables. The smile was still on her face when she looked up and saw Miles in the doorway, but it soon died away as she saw the expression in his eyes. He was angry. Furiously, undeniably angry. So much so that he barely even acknowledged his sister or his nephew, who both looked nervously between him and Chloe before making their goodbyes and heading up to the house.

  “Is something wrong?” Chloe asked, her fingers clutching tight around the currycomb in her hand as if her life depended on it.

  “Who are you? Really?” Miles demanded.

  Waves of rage billowed off him, and Chloe swallowed against the knot of fear that now constricted her throat.

  “I... I’m Chloe Fitzgerald. Just like I always told you. I never lied about who I am.”

  “Chloe Fitzgerald. Daughter of Loretta and John Fitzgerald of Royal, Texas.”

  Her legs began to shake. He knew? How? What had happened?

  “Miles, please. I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you so many times.”

  “Really? We’ve been virtually glued at the hip for the past two and a half weeks. Living side by side, sleeping together, making love—”

  His voice broke on the last two words, and Chloe felt her heart begin to shatter into a million tiny pieces. He dragged in a breath and continued.

  “I trusted you. I brought you here. To my family home. And you—” His voice broke off and he shook his head. “I don’t even know what kind of agenda you had. Can you imagine how it felt to have someone else inform me as to your true identity? You violated every level of trust I placed in you. I can’t believe I was that blind. Did it give you a good laugh to deceive me? And, tell me, our first meeting—it was a sham right from the start, wasn’t it?”

  “Miles, I’m sorry—”

  He put up a hand, halting her in whatever she’d been about to say next.

  “Don’t. Just don’t bother lying to me anymore. I want you out of here. I’ve arranged a car for you to the airport and a charter flight to get you home. After that, you’re on your own.”

  He turned to leave and she shot across the short distance that separated them and grabbed hold of his arm.

  “And you’re just dumping me like that? Without hearing me out? Without trying to understand any of this from my point of view?”

  “Sure looks that way,” he said harshly, and shook off her hand.

  “Miles, I love you.”

  “Oh, don’t go making this any worse than it already is. I think we’ve already established you’re a liar.”

  “But I haven’t lied to you. I might have omitted to tell you everything about my family’s background, but I haven’t lied.”

  “So you’re saying our meeting was a coincidence?”

  “No.” She
shook her head. “I’m not. I did force our meeting. I had this ridiculous idea that I could somehow insert myself into your life and learn what I could about your family with a view to using what I learned to somehow help my mom get her life back on track. She’s lived with the misery of knowing your father’s actions drove my father to suicide all these years. She wanted some kind of payback. And me? Well, I wanted my mom back.”

  “Payback? Why not call it what it is. Revenge.” His voice was cold, and the expression on his face told her it tasted as bad in his mouth as admitting it to him had tasted in hers. “I can’t believe I was so stupid as to fall for you.”

  She felt each word as if it was a stab to her heart.

  “Miles, I never expected to fall in love with you, either.”

  “Oh, so that makes what you did better? I don’t think so. You’ve not only betrayed me, you’ve betrayed my whole family. I’ve said my piece. The car will be here in fifteen minutes. Make sure you’re in it when it leaves.”

  He started to walk away from her again, and she knew she had only one last chance to try and make this right.

  “You have no idea what it’s like. To see your father crumble from the strong and healthy man who loved and supported you to someone who just sat in a chair and wept constantly. I was eight years old. Eight! It terrified me. And when he decided it was easier to take his life than to face rebuilding it with my mom and me, I was the one who found him. It was...horrifying.

  “And then my mom fell apart. She’d held it together through the worst of the company stuff, but after he died she lost it. She still hasn’t recovered. Yes, she’s bitter and, yes, that bitterness transferred to me. Have I spent every day since my father killed himself wondering if one day I’d come home and discover my mom had done the same thing? Of course, I have.”

  Chloe paused and dashed away the tears of anguish and grief that stung her eyes before taking a deep breath and continuing in a fiercely controlled voice. “And did we see your family lose anything while we lost it all?” She shook her head. “You lost nothing. Your father could have reached out at any time and helped us, or, here’s an idea, honored his original agreement with my father. But he chose not to. So I grew up hating your family—all of you. And when the news came about the fire and the failed safety inspections, well, I saw an opportunity to exploit your misery and I took it.

  “But I never expected to discover you were not like your father. I never expected to love you.”

  Miles stood there—immovable, expressionless—as she spoke so passionately. As she laid her heart bare to him.

  “Are you done?” he gritted out.

  She could no longer speak. Her eyes flooded with persistent tears, and her throat completely closed as a massive sob rose from deep within and choked her. And then he walked away.

  Chloe couldn’t remember how she traversed the distance between the stables and the house, but she found herself in their room, her suitcase opened on the bed, and piling the items she’d brought with her into it. The tears had stopped, but the raw pain of loss clawed at her from deep inside. It couldn’t end this way, she kept telling herself. But it had.

  She didn’t even bother changing her clothes. She knew he wanted her out of here and that’s what she had to do. Once she was packed and had double-checked she hadn’t left anything behind, she grabbed her handbag and her suitcase and went downstairs. Ava was just coming in through the front door with Keith Cooper as Chloe reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “Chloe? You’re leaving us?”

  “Miles has asked me to go,” she said stiffly. “But before I do, I just wanted to apologize to you. To your whole family, really. I didn’t disclose who I was, and by omission I have lied to you all about my intentions toward your family. I didn’t expect to like you all so much, much less fall in love with Miles. But I can’t deny that I had an agenda when I met him. My feelings for Miles, now, are true. I only hope that someday he can forgive me for what I’ve done.”

  “Oh, Chloe.”

  Unexpectedly, Ava rushed toward her and enveloped Chloe in a brief hug. Chloe held herself stiffly. Unable to accept the solace Miles’s mother offered because if she did, she would crumble into a thousand pieces and not be able to move again. She had to say her goodbyes. She had to leave. Not to do so would be in direct contradiction of his wishes and, above all else, his wishes were paramount.

  Thankfully, Ava let her go and, with a nod to Keith Cooper, Chloe continued out the front door and to the car that had just pulled up in the driveway.

  “Ms. Fitzgerald?” the driver asked as he got out of the car to open the back door for her and take her case.

  “Yes.”

  She got in the rear of the car and the driver closed the door. The dull thud a final knell to the hopes she’d begun to nurture that she could have a future with Miles. Once the driver had stowed her case in the trunk, he took his seat behind the wheel.

  “To the airport, right?”

  “Yes, to the airport.”

  She didn’t even bother looking back. This was the last time she would leave Texas. The first had been painful and full of uncertainty, but this was so much worse. Because this time she felt as though she was leaving a vital part of her behind. A part that she would never recover again.

  By the time she landed in Chicago it was getting late. She texted her mom from the airport to let her know she was back. It took her just over an hour and a half, using public transport, to get to her home. Despite her mother’s frequent visits, the house smelled musty, but Chloe locked the front door behind her, dropped her bags in the hallway and then went straight to her bathroom and turned on the shower.

  She could still smell the scent of her horse on her clothing as she stripped off and stepped into the shower stall. And there, she let go of all the pent-up misery of the past several hours. It was ages later before she could summon the energy to wash her body and her hair. Even longer before she had the strength to turn off the water and dry herself.

  Exhausted by grief, she tumbled naked into her bed and closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep, but all she could think about was the shock and betrayal she’d seen on Miles’s face. Knowing she’d hurt him so badly was like being flayed with a whip and left her entire body sore and aching. She thought she was done crying but as she flipped and flopped on the bed, she realized that her pillow was now sodden with the steady stream of tears that simply would not let up.

  So she curled into a ball and she let herself cry and wail and howl. And in the end, none of it made any difference. She was still alone. And she’d devastated the only man she’d ever truly loved.

  * * *

  “Chloe? I know you’re in there, honey. I’ll let myself in if you don’t come to the door.”

  Chloe woke to the sound of her mother’s fist battering on her front door. She dragged herself from her bed and wrapped herself in a robe before staggering to the door and opening it. Bright sunlight streamed through the open portal, temporarily blinding her, and she put a hand up to shade her eyes.

  “Oh, honey. What happened?” Loretta asked, stepping across the threshold and kicking the door closed behind her while enveloping her daughter in her arms.

  Chloe tried to hold herself together, the way she always had for her mom. Since her father’s death she’d learned that her role was to comfort her mom, not the other way around, but right now she lacked the energy to hide her hurt. Instead, she leaned right into Loretta’s softer frame and put her arms around her mother’s waist.

  “I fell in love, Momma. And I broke his heart and then he broke mine.”

  “Oh, my darling girl. I’m so sorry.”

  Her mother hugged her tight and didn’t move, didn’t say a thing. Just held her. The tears cleared more quickly this time and, once she’d stopped, Loretta led her into the sitting room and pushed her down onto the couch.

  “I�
��ll go make us some coffee and get you something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry, Momma, truly.”

  “I’m going to fix you something and you’re going to eat it. Then you’re going to tell me everything.”

  “I don’t have any food in the house,” Chloe protested.

  “And why do you think I came around this morning?” Loretta asked as she moved around the room opening windows. “I got you some groceries. If you’d given me notice that you were coming home, I’d have aired the place out and had some food in the fridge for you for when you arrived. But as it stands, I’m glad you didn’t, because you’d have just borne this alone, wouldn’t you?”

  Chloe couldn’t deny it. She’d spent the last nineteen years learning to suck up whatever bothered her and, while this was more monumental than anything she’d endured before, she would have tried to shield her mom from this, too.

  “It makes no difference. Telling you won’t change the outcome.”

  “A problem shared is a problem halved, honey. Remember that.”

  Chloe cracked the weakest of smiles as her mom espoused one of her dad’s favorite sayings. He also used to say that happiness shared was doubled, but Chloe didn’t know if she’d ever feel happy again. She sat back on the couch and watched as her mom put away a couple of bags of groceries and then put a pan on the stovetop. Soon the air was redolent with the aroma of fresh coffee, toasted bread and fried eggs with bacon. The scents of her childhood, she realized as Loretta loaded everything on a tray and brought it through to her.

  Despite her protestation that she wasn’t hungry, Chloe did her best to eat the simple meal her mom had prepared for her. To her surprise, once she started, she couldn’t stop until it was all gone. She was on her second cup of coffee when her mother sat down next to her and patted her on the leg.

  “Now, tell me everything,” she urged her daughter.

  So Chloe did. She unloaded everything—well, the G-rated version anyway—that she’d said and done with Miles right up until he’d ordered her out of his life. To her credit, Loretta didn’t once interrupt, and when Chloe was finished speaking she merely shook her head.