The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal

by Anna Erishkigal

  I looked at the judge.

  "Was that a yes-or-no question?" I asked. "Yes … I want you to believe? Or no, I never slept with my boss? Because I'm not really sure how to answer that question unless you make him rephrase it."

  "Counsel for the defendant will rephrase the question?"

  Eva's barrister strode forward and placed that stupid newspaper clipping on the railing in front of me.

  "You just testified that you and Adam Bristow only kissed twice, is that correct?"

  "Yes."

  "And those kisses were platonic, correct?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you stand by that statement?"

  I took the paper and held it.

  "Yes."

  "Miss Xalbadora, I have just handed you a newspaper clipping from the Daily News. Do you recognize this photograph?"

  "Yes."

  "Could you please explain to the judge what is happening in the photograph?"

  I knew what it looked like in the photograph, but we'd been interrupted. The flash had spooked Adam and sent him retreating behind a wall.

  "It's just two people having a dance, Your Honor." I held the photograph towards him. "In a room with about a thousand other people."

  "Objection!" Adam's barrister shouted. "He's badgering the witness."

  "I have a right to impeach my own witness," Eva's barrister said. "We have physical evidence that the witness is lying."

  "You might as well just let him have it," I told Greyhound. "He's going to get it into evidence anyway. If you do it his way, it just makes it look like we've got something to hide."

  The judge held his gavel above his bench, but he didn't pound it. He had, by now, figured out this wasn't my first rodeo.

  "Counselor?" he asked Adam's barrister.

  "Oh, go ahead," Greyhound grumbled.

  The judge took the photograph and examined it. Adam had been about to kiss me, and I'd been about to kiss him back. If the photographer hadn't startled Adam with the flash, we would have kissed for certain, and likely ended up together that night in bed. And if we hadn't ended up together that night, we've have somehow ended up in bed together during the five days Pippa was supposed to have gone with Eva, because if Eva hadn't pulled her little fit to prevent that from happening, right now Adam and I would be an item.

  I met Adam's gaze. He wore that trapped look an animal has just as the knacker leads it down the chute for slaughter and it sees the horse in front of it get a bullet in the brain.

  The judge gave me a pointed look.

  "You may resume your line of questioning," the judge told Eva's barrister.

  "So," Eva's barrister said. "Earlier you testified you'd only ever kissed the defendant's HUSBAND twice, both times in a non-romantic capacity, but here we have a photograph that depicts something entirely different. Why should this court believe anything you've testified to today?"

  I pointed at the picture.

  "What do you see?" I asked the judge.

  "Objection," Eva's barrister shouted.

  "Well?" I asked. "What do you see?"

  The judge gave me a raised eyebrow.

  "I'll be the judge of that, counselor." He looked at the picture and then looked at me. "What I see here, Miss, is a man and woman who are about to kiss."

  I nodded and pointed at it again.

  "Do you actually see us kissing, Sir?" I asked.

  The judge said. "No."

  "Pippa didn't run away because I kissed her daddy. She ran away because the next morning her mother saw that picture in the newspaper and stood her up for Christmas without even bothering to call her. Until that point, I think Eva figured she could just snap her fingers and Adam would come running back to her. But when she saw this picture, she realized…" I glanced at Eva. "It finally dawned on her that Adam had moved on."

  For the first time I saw Eva's bitch façade crack. It was a pyrrhic victory. Both combatants were mortally wounded. Nobody ever won when two people who used to love one another eviscerated each other in court. Not them. And not the innocent bystanders around them.

  I looked down at my hands.

  "Only after Adam almost kissed me and was startled by the flash, he told me I deserved better than to be somebody's rebound. So after that, he kept his distance. He loves Pippa too much to do anything that might cost him custody of his daughter."

  The courtroom fell silent, even the harpies on the other side of the railing. Everybody knew, in any court of decency, that Eva had just failed to score her point. Her father jabbed her barrister and pointed at his dog to go in for the final kill.

  "Miss Xalbadora," Eva's barrister asked. "One more question, and then we'll let you go." He glanced back at Eva's father, wanting to make sure he really wanted to do this. Eva grabbed her father's arm and said 'no.' Eva's father pushed her arm away. From the beginning, this battle had been his war Maynor Jackson the jilted Oil King, to prevent his Magic Oil Man from taking his extraction expertise to his chief competitor or, in the absence of that, to destroy him any way he could. He gave the signal for his dog to attack.

  "Miss Xalbadora," Eva's barrister asked. "Are you in love with Adam Bristow?"

  I looked at my bracelet, the one which had been tied so securely to my wrist that the only way to remove it was to get a knife and cut it off. I'd told myself all kinds of things after Adam had given me that bracelet. That he was marking me as his woman. That if I was patient and I waited, that someday he would be a free man, and when he was, Adam Bristow would want me.

  I looked up and met his gaze. His blue-green eyes were filled with sorrow and grief and dread and … fear. Fear that I'd say I loved him? Or fear that I would say I didn't?

  "Yes," I said. "I am in love with Adam Bristow."

  A small cry escaped from Eva's throat.

  Adam stood up and reached for me. Eva looked over at her soon-to-be ex-husband, and she knew. She knew what I knew in that moment, and the judge, and every other person in that courtroom, that my feelings for Adam weren't one-sided, but that Adam Bristow possessed feelings for me.

  "Then how are we supposed to believe a single word you just said about Pippa's well-being, Miss Xalbadora," Eva's barrister asked, "when by your own testimony you are not an unbiased witness?"

  I looked not at the judge, nor the barrister. Nor did I look at Adam, even though I desperately wanted to see his face. No. I spoke to Eva, who even now was arguing with her father who I could see had some nasty ace hidden up his sleeve, and she didn't want him to play that card because even she, bitch that she was, had a limit on how far she would go to win. But she'd been caught up in the game, and now the bigger predators were out to finish off the prey.

  "I know a thing or two about being a pawn in a custody dispute," I said. "You all view Pippa as some hunk of meat you can haggle over until somebody's inflicted enough damage to drag away the carcass. But you never stopped to ask what would happen to Pippa after you won."

  Tears streamed down my cheeks. All the tears I'd never shed because I'd been too numb after my parent's divorce to truly feel until a gentle man and a spirited little girl taught me what it meant to feel true love.

  "You keep score to see how many points you inflict upon the other, but what you don't realize is that Pippa loves the both of you, and when one of you is hurt, it doesn't matter which one, she feels that wound as deeply as if it is her own. How will she heal the scars your fangs and claws and swords inflicted on her on your eagerness to defeat each other?"

  I stared at Adam.

  "But you see, I did ask those questions. Because it's not just Pippa's daddy I fell in love with, but I fell in love with her. And I want what's best for her, even if that means I can't be in the picture anymore."

  I turned to the judge.

  "Can I go home now, please?" I said. "Because when the constables came to take me here to testify, it really scared her. And when Pippa is scared, she does things like run away."

  The judge nodded.

  "The witness is
excused from any further testimony."

  "But I wasn't finished…" Eva's barrister said.

  "You've done enough damage," the judge said. "I've heard more than enough to make my decision. I hereby rule that permanent custody should go to the father, with supervised visitation to the mother until she attends therapy and a parent education class. I also rule the Condamine River Ranch is excluded property; the wife is not entitled to a share of that asset. As for the remaining property, you will have my decision within thirty days. I hereby rule this divorce is granted on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. It shall … become final in 90 days."

  The judge banged his gavel.

  "Miss Xalbadora, thank you for your time."

  I stepped down from the witness stand, my legs shaky. Adam stepped towards me, his face ecstatic with relief. Free! He was finally a free man! My pulse beat faster. Would he hug me? Would he shake me for airing his dirty laundry in public? Would he ask if I'd been smoking Mrs. Hastings's hemp to have the audacity to think a man like him could ever love a woman like me?

  Eva's barrister took a piece of paper from Maynor Jackson. He stepped up to the bench, and said, "Your Honor, in the matter of custody of Pippa Bristow, we have one more piece of important evidence the court did not consider."

  Eva's father leaned back and shot me a look that said, 'you just lost, bitch."

  The judge read the paper. Both eyebrows shot up. He held up his gavel as though he wished to pound it, but instead of banging it on his desk, he clenched it to his shoulder as if he was about to hurl it at Eva Jackson's father.

  "I have no choice but to vacate my earlier decision pending the resolution of a matter which has just been brought to this court's attention." The judge looked at Adam, his eyes filled that same look doctors give you when they're about to tell you bad news. "Were you aware, Sir, that Pippa is not your biological daughter?"

  "That's ridiculous!" Adam's barrister shouted. "My client was legally married to the defendant at the time of Pippa's birth."

  The judge held up the piece of paper.

  "According to this affidavit signed by the defendant wife, Pippa's biological father is the late Prince Philip of Zurikhistan."

  My jaw dropped open.

  Adam looked like he'd just been drop-kicked in the nuts. A sense of vertigo made the room spin.

  An older man wearing a horrifically expensive-looking designer suit stood up from where he'd been sitting quietly in the audience and stepped up to the railing which separated the bidders from the meat on the auction block. He held out a packet of papers that had to be eleven inches thick.

  "Your Honor," the man said in a heavy Slavic-sounding accent. "I have here a cross-complaint for full custody of Pippa Bristow, filed by King Azhanibek of Zurikhistan. Pippa's biological grandfather."

  The courtroom erupted into chaos.

  Chapter 54

  It was a cold, sterile room, typical of all government buildings, with stark white paint, a cold metal table, a few token paintings of judges who'd been dead for decades, and what had to be the world's most uncomfortable chairs. I sat in numb silence, shivering from the air conditioner which kept the stale, musty scent of fear at bay, wondering if Adam would be able to break away from his legal team long enough to see me.

  At last the door opened and Adam walked in, the man who'd just received a bullet in the heart. His face was twisted into a look you see when an astronaut has been strapped into a G-force machine and spun around the centrifuge until he pukes. He walked shakily to the metal table, a proud man who'd just his dignity publically stripped away. Cuckolded. The ultimate insult to a man. I ushered him into one of the chairs before he fell down.

  "Are you alright?"

  His voice ground out a warbling reply. "No."

  He grabbed my hand the way a drowning man might hold onto a life preserver, his face twisted into a tortured mask of anger and grief as he squeezed my hand so tightly I feared he might crush my bones.

  "If this case was based solely on Australian law," Adam said, "it would be a slam-dunk. Eva married me before Pippa was born, and for the past ten years I have raised her as my own child. So long as we remain married, the Australian court will tell King Azhanibek to go to hell."

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. His voice warbled as he spoke.

  "Unfortunately, when I filed for divorce, Australian law is silent on what happens when the court awards custody to a non-biological father. Under Zurikhistan law, no heir of the crown can be disinherited without a signed order from the king himself. Because the crown prince never told the king he'd gotten his girlfriend pregnant, under their law Pippa is still his lawful heir."

  "But Zurikhistan law shouldn't matter," I said. "Pippa was born here."

  "According to Eva's affidavit, and unfortunately her father gave the court the evidence to back it up before King Azhanibek made his move, Pippa was conceived in Zurikhistan, which gives the King legal grounds for long-arm jurisdiction."

  A princess… Shiyte! Adam had always treated his daughter like a princess, but to have her turn out to actually be one! I remembered the dream of Adam's father pointing down at the calf he refused to rescue because it did not bear his brand.

  "How long have you known?"

  "Known?" Adam grimaced, his expression guilty. "I just found out when you did." He stared past my shoulder. "Suspected…"

  There was a long moment of silence.

  "It didn't matter. I did not want to know."

  All of the missing puzzle pieces fell into place. Adam's defensiveness whenever somebody insinuated Pippa did not take after him. His father's disinheriting him. How careful Adam had been to never push Eva too far as he delicately tried to extricate himself from a bad marriage without losing custody of his child.

  "How did you really end up married to Eva Jackson?"

  Adam stared down at the floor.

  "Maynor Jackson has always purchased his daughter's friends."

  "Roberta Dingle?"

  "And me." Adam stared right at me, but it wasn't me he looked at, but something in his past. "Eva has the same learning disability as Pippa, so Maynor hired me to be her tutor. I needed the money, and I think it gave him a cheap thrill to stick it to my father. Eva knew what her father was up to, so at first she wouldn't give me the time of day. She said … she said I was bloody boring…"

  I winced.

  "… but after a while, she began to think of me as a friend."

  "Friends don't do what she just did to you."

  Adam was unable to meet my gaze.

  "Maynor Jackson wanted access to the Zurikhistanian oil fields, so he introduced her to Prince Philip, and when the prince began to pursue her, Maynor gave the match his blessing. I mean, Philip was a prince. I never stood a chance and I knew it."

  Adam sighed.

  "I pretended it didn't kill me inside to listen to Eva talk about how happy she was when Philip began to talk about marriage. Then one day, Philip was killed in a skiing accident. When Eva turned to me for comfort…"

  Adam fell silent. I winced, even though it had happened eleven years ago. Adam slid his hand up to caress the black leather bracelet he'd tied around my wrist, as if each knot had a special meaning.

  "A few weeks later Eva came to me and said she was carrying my child," Adam's voice warbled. "My father said she was playing me for a fool, but I told him it didn't matter if Godzilla was the baby's father. I loved her, and I wanted to love her baby! I figured, why would she name me as the father if she was carrying Prince Philip's lawful heir?"

  Philip … Pippa … How could he have missed it? I thought of the statue of Saint Joseph back at Saint Joseph's school.

  "If you'd have married her anyways, then why did she hide Pippa's true paternity?"

  Adam's voice turned bitter.

  "I didn't know it at the time, but Eva is bipolar. When she's manic, she's prone to go off her medication and have … flings. While she was seeing Philip, she got drunk one nigh
t and went to a …"

  He grimaced.

  "Sex … party…"

  His lip curled in revulsion.

  "Prince Philip was devastated when the King showed him the pictures, so he broke up with her, and then he took a ski-jump off the side of a cliff."

  My jaw fell open.

  "Prince Philip committed suicide?"

  Adam swallowed.

  "They called it an accident, but King Azhanibek blamed Eva and threw her, and Jackson Oil Company, right out of Zurikhistan. Maynor was furious he'd lost the right to drill, so when Eva discovered she was pregnant, rather than tell her father she had no idea who the baby's real father was, she seduced me and told everyone Pippa was mine."

  "Roberta Dingle knew?"

  "Roberta Dingle suspected," Adam said. "Like me, she was just a purchased friend."

  Talk about realizing you've been used…

  "What are you going to do?"

  Adam's hand trembled as he reached up to touch my hair. He slid his fingers along the long, black strands which were still bound to my scalp in a conservative chignon.

  "Pippa is King Azhanibek's only living descendant," Adam said. "He had no idea she existed until somebody showed him a video of Eva beating a white-haired, silver-eyed little girl. He's filed a complaint for full custody of Pippa, alleging Eva is an unfit mother, and I have no standing because I am not her biological father. He wants to take Pippa back to Zurikhistan to rear as their future queen."

  Bile rose in my throat. Oh, God! I did this! This is all my fault!

  "You can't let him take Pippa away!"

  Adam's tortured eyes turned jade with grief. A sick feeling clenched at the pit of my stomach as his jaw clenched into a grim expression.

  "Maynor has come up with a plan." He stroked the aboriginal bracelet, the one which had carved into it dreams of fairies and unicorns. "We just met with the judge in-chambers. It will be appealed, but the judge thinks it will enable us to keep Pippa in the country, in Australian courts, and not where the King has the final say."