Judd considered the paperwork inside his briefcase. He hadn’t dared to leave it in the office in case Anna saw it before he’d completed his plans. Everything had to be lined up just so for all this to work. She wouldn’t be happy, and he hoped their burgeoning relationship would weather the fallout once it all went ahead. Her place was with him now; surely she’d see he had no other choice.
He waited for the sense of satisfaction that usually infused him when he thought of his plans coming to fruition, but instead he felt oddly flat. Must just be tired, he rationalized. Between nights with Anna, demanding days in the office and even more demanding time at the hospital, he was definitely not operating at his peak.
As he entered the front lobby he could hear women’s voices from the salon. He dropped his briefcase near a hall table and walked through, gritting his teeth as he tried to force a welcoming smile onto his face. The last thing he felt up to right now was company, but appearances had to be maintained.
He could barely believe his eyes as he pushed open the salon door.
“Mother?”
Cynthia rose from her seat and put out her arms to her son. Automatically, Judd crossed the room and allowed his mother to embrace him.
“My boy, I’ve missed you.”
“Why are you here?”
Cynthia pouted. “What? Didn’t you miss me, too?”
“Of course,” Judd said, brushing her words aside.
She was the last person he wanted to deal with right now. His plans for Wilson Wines needed to be carefully executed and he didn’t need the distraction of worrying if his mother was about to preempt his weeks of carefully layered construction—or deconstruction as the case would be.
He cast a look in Anna’s direction. She was pale and sitting with her spine rigid. Her hazel eyes were clouded with an emotion he couldn’t quite put his finger on. His protective instincts rose to the surface—surprising him with their intensity. Anna had been fine when he’d spoken to her at the office before he’d headed off to the hospital, which meant that whatever had upset her had happened between then and now. That only left one person who was likely to be the cause, which begged the question, what had Cynthia done to upset Anna?
“Everything okay at the office?” he asked.
“Of course,” Anna replied. “I have some papers in my case for you when you have a moment.”
“Surely you two can leave work alone for one evening. I’ve just arrived and I want to hear everything about what you’ve been up to while you’ve been gone,” Cynthia interjected.
“Let me leave you two to it,” Anna said, rising coolly from her seat. “I have plenty to attend to while you catch up.”
“You don’t need to go,” Judd said, wondering why Anna seemed so keen to create some distance between them.
“Let her,” his mother said, her long fingers tightening around his forearm. “It’ll be lovely to be just the two of us over dinner, don’t you think?”
He didn’t think anything of the kind. Something was terribly wrong and he had no idea what it was.
“I’ll speak to you later, then. If you’re sure you won’t join us?”
A crooked smile twisted Anna’s lips. “Oh, I’m sure. You two enjoy catching up. I’ll leave the papers in your room.”
He watched with narrowed eyes as Anna left the room, closing the salon door with silent precision. Something was very wrong and the minute she’d gone he felt the exhaustion of earlier tug at him again.
“I wish you’d told me you were coming to visit,” Judd said to his mother as they assumed their seats.
“I was hoping to surprise you.”
Judd felt a flare of anger burst inside. Surprise him? She had to be kidding. When everything hung so carefully in the balance it was the last thing he needed.
“You certainly succeeded at that,” he said ruefully. “How long are you planning to stay?”
“A week, maybe,” Cynthia replied. “Longer, if necessary.”
“Longer?” The word slipped out before he could prevent it. He was more tired than he thought.
“What’s the matter, Judd? You know what we planned.”
“Yes, and I also know you were supposed to wait until I told you to come over.”
“But I heard that your father was gravely ill—not from you, I might add.”
“He’s ill, Mother, not dead.”
“Well, either way,” Cynthia said airily, her hands fluttering in the air, “if you want him to be aware of your revenge, then you’re running out of time. You’ve got to get to work on taking it all over and doing with it what you want to—which is to give the house to me, right?”
That was what they’d planned, but Judd felt himself reluctant to commit to agreeing with her. The whole time he’d grown up at The Masters’ he’d always felt as though he didn’t fully belong. Strangely enough, he felt as if he fitted here.
He redirected his mother’s conversation to the family back at The Masters’ as they went through to dinner, but all the while he was acutely conscious of Anna’s empty chair at the table. When he was finished with his meal he excused himself, citing business he urgently needed to attend to, and he went back to the lobby to retrieve his briefcase.
He was surprised to see a stack of suitcases by the front door. They hadn’t been there when he’d arrived home, and they couldn’t be his mother’s. She would have complained long and hard if the airline had lost her luggage, however temporarily. A sound on the staircase behind him made him turn to see Anna, an overnight bag in one hand and her handbag slung over one shoulder.
“What’s this?” he demanded, his hand flung out toward the cases at his feet.
Outside, he heard a car pull up on the driveway and give a toot.
“My stuff. I’m moving out. That’ll be Mr. Evans with my car.” She stepped past him to open the front door and hefted one of her cases onto the front porch. “Thanks for bringing my car around. I hope we can fit everything in,” she said to the handyman as he came up the stairs to get her cases.
“What do you mean, you’re moving out?”
“Just that.” She turned to Evans and gestured to the rest of her things in the lobby. “All of these, too, please.”
“Hold on a minute. Where are you going and, more important, why?”
Anna shook her head. “I think you know why. Tell me, did you really come back to wreak revenge on your father? Did you mean to give this house to your mother all along?”
He stood in silence. A silence that damned him in her eyes. Eyes that were now hazed with pain and a sorrow that went so deep he wanted to do anything and everything to make it go away.
Her voice was hoarse when she spoke. “You always thought the worst of me, but it never occurred to me to think you were capable of something like this. I didn’t want to believe you could be so calculating, but it seems I was terribly wrong. I really don’t know you at all, do I?”
Evans had collected the last of her bags and was now waiting by her car. Anna started to head out the door. Judd wanted to call out to her, to physically restrain her from leaving, but he knew he had no right. He had meant to give his mother this house all along and he had meant so much more harm to Charles, as well. Right now, though, none of that seemed important anymore as the woman he suddenly realized had come to mean so much to him walked out the door.
A slow burn of anger started deep inside of him. He had never lost control of a situation ever before, and right now everything he’d worked hard for these past weeks, his whole lifetime, in fact, started to crumble. He rubbed at his eyes, unable to dislodge the picture of the misery on Anna’s face no matter how hard he tried.
“It’s for the best, Judd.” His mother’s voice came from behind him and he whirled around to face her.
“For the best? What makes you say that?”
“She had ideas above her station and she’d have eventually dragged you down to her level. You know that, don’t you? After all, look at what her mother did for Charles. Nothing. She was a convenient mistress and a passable housekeeper. No doubt Anna’s been riding on her mother’s abilities to sneak her way into Charles’s wealth through his bed, too.” Cynthia stepped closer, placing one hand on his arm and closing her fingers around it in a hold that surprised him with its strength. “Trust me, Judd. You’re better off without her.”
He stared at his mother’s fingers and their clawlike grip, the physical manifestation of her hold on him the perfect analogy for how she’d tried to direct him all his life. As her words ran through his mind—words that he knew, in this case, to be totally untrue—he wondered what else his mother had told him that had been twisted and distorted away from the truth to suit her own manipulations.
“Did you tell her?”
“About the house? Of course I did. She needed to know, Judd. She doesn’t belong here any more than her mother ever did.”
“She was an invited guest under this roof.”
His mother’s face paled beneath expertly applied cosmetics. “I don’t like your implication, Judd.”
“Like it or not, it’s still my name on the deed to this property.”
“A mere technicality. You know what this place means to me.”
“More than anything or anyone else, yes.”
Weariness swamped him with the awareness that Cynthia’s obsession with this property was outside normal perceptions. Clearly she felt it was owed to her for all she’d lost when she was younger, and for all she’d endured during her marriage to Charles and her subsequent banishment back home to Australia. It was unhealthy and Judd was annoyed with himself that he’d never seen it before now.
Cynthia was Cynthia. She’d never pretended to be anything else but what she’d presented to the world. Subterfuge had never been her style, ever, which was why he’d always assumed that she’d never been anything but honest with him. Only now did he realize that while she didn’t lie, per se, her accounts on matters that affected her deeply were twisted by her bitterness into something that only vaguely resembled the truth. Accepting that, and the fact that as an adult he should have seen it sooner, filled him with a fury at himself that he could barely contain.
She’d always be his mother, and he’d always love her as such, but right now he didn’t like the person she was very much at all. He needed some distance between them before his anger bubbled over and he said something he might regret.
All his instincts urged him to follow Anna, but with that he was forced to admit he had no idea where to go to look for her. Frustration rose within him anew. Even if he did know where to find her, he doubted she was in the mood to listen to him. He pulled himself free of his mother’s clasp, the movement as metaphorical as it was literal.
“Look, it’s late and I have work to get through. I’ll see you in the morning and we can discuss your return to The Masters’.”
“My return? But I’ve only just arr—”
“We’ll talk in the morning,” he said firmly, and grabbing his briefcase he went upstairs.
Anna didn’t know how much longer she could take this. Working with Judd and feeling about him the way she did, yet knowing just how ruthless he really was, was making her feel sick inside. She had hardly slept over the weekend. The cheap motel she’d discovered on Friday night was hardly in a secluded area and the constant traffic noise and the racket from a nearby bar and club had ensured her nights were punctuated by the kinds of sounds that had dragged her from her restless sleep with a start more than once.
When she’d left the house on Friday she’d been too distraught to think carefully about where she was headed. In the end, to avoid creating an accident, she’d pulled into the motel thinking that it would be for only a night before she found an apartment in the city. But the weekend had passed in a blur of visits to the hospital, timing them to avoid Judd, and spending the rest of her time wallowing in a blend of self-pity and self-disgust that she could have been so foolish as to lose her heart to a man as cold and unforgiving as Judd Wilson.
After a lifetime of promising herself she deserved so much more than her mother had settled for, she’d just gone and found herself falling into the same pattern. Falling in love with a man with whom she would never be an equal—a man who would never offer her more than a job and his bed to sleep in.
She wished she could turn her feelings off as easily as Judd had appeared to do. He’d come into the office this Monday morning with nothing but a professional attitude and a driving work ethic. She should be grateful for that, at least, she thought as she brought his mail in to him.
He was on the phone and she made to put the opened correspondence on the desk in front of him and walk away, but when she did, he reached out and clasped her hand in his, preventing her from walking away. The instant he touched her she flinched, and saw the corresponding frown that crept between his brows as she did so. Anna gave an experimental tug but he continued to hold her firm.
The touch of his fingers on her skin was torture. How many times had those same fingers traversed the length of her body and wrought pleasure from her such as she had never known before? She bit back the sound that threatened to rise in her chest at the memory. The memory of the passion and the betrayal.
Finally, Judd finished his call and relinquished his hold on her.
“Get your bag, we’re going to the hospital,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument.
“Is Charles all right?” she asked, fear clawing at her throat at the serious expression on Judd’s face.
“He’s come out of the coma and he’s asking for us. Both of us.”
The journey to the hospital seemed to take forever, or maybe it just seemed that way because she was bound in this small space inside Judd’s car. She was intensely aware of him, from the grip of his hands on the steering wheel to the set of his jaw. And his scent—the scent that insidiously reminded her of dark nights when all she knew was the feel and smell of him, and the sensation of her own pleasure, as he made love to her all through those nights.
She let out a sigh of relief as they pulled into the hospital parking lot and strived to keep her distance from Judd as they walked together to the elevator bank that would take them to the intensive-care unit.
“Only one at a time and only for five minutes,” the nurse instructed.
“You go first,” Judd said to Anna. “I know how important he is to you, how worried you’ve been.”
She silently examined his words, searching for a hidden meaning behind them, but there was nothing about his expression that suggested his words meant anything other than what was said. She nodded her acquiescence and went into the room where Charles was hooked up to all manner of equipment. He opened his eyes as she entered, a shaky smile on his lips.
“Oh, Charles,” she said, sinking onto the visitor’s chair beside his bed, tears filling her eyes, “we’ve been so worried about you.”
“Ah, Anna, still fussing?”
He reached for her and she gave him her hand, surprised at the strength she felt in his fingers as he squeezed tight.
“Of course I’m still fussing. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t, right?”
He sighed and smiled a little wider. “That’s my girl. How are things between you and my boy? Before this little incident I was beginning to hope there was something special growing between you.”
Anna didn’t want to talk about her and Judd, not now. “Hardly a little incident, Charles. You have to take better care of yourself. In fact, when you go home I’ve arranged for nursing care for you until you’re back on your feet.”
Her voice trailed away as
she realized what she’d just said. If Cynthia Wilson had her way, Charles wouldn’t be returning to the home he knew and loved. In fact, if what she’d said last Friday night held any truth to it, Charles had nowhere to call home at all. The news would shatter his chances at recovery. Somehow she had to persuade Judd to allow his father to live out his years under the roof that had been his home for over thirty years. She felt sick at the prospect but fought to keep her fears from her face. As ill as Charles was, he’d always been pretty astute. He’d know something was wrong if she didn’t control herself.
“Pshaw!” he scoffed. “Nurses. I’ve only been awake a few hours and I’ve already had my fill of them. But you’re not answering my question. You and Judd. What’s happening there?”
“We’re working well together,” Anna hedged.
“Working well together.” He said the words as if they tasted like something nasty. “Sounds like you’ve had a lovers’ spat, hmm? You know, I hope you two can work out whatever it is that’s keeping you apart. I know you haven’t exactly had the best of role models for long-term commitment—Lord only knows I didn’t treat your mother as well as I ought to have. She stood by me, you know. She held me together and loved me even when I didn’t deserve it. I owed her more than companionship, but I wasn’t capable of offering her more.”
“Mum was happy, Charles, really.” Tears pricked at Anna’s eyes.
“Ah, always the mediator. You deserve more than I gave her, Anna. It’s your due. Remember that.”
Out the corner of her eye she saw the nurse gesture to her. “Look, my five minutes is up and I don’t want to use up Judd’s time with you, too. We can talk about this later.”
Much later, like never, she hoped as she leaned forward to give him a chaste kiss on his cheek.
The Wayward Son Page 15