“Seemed like a very quick five minutes to me,” Charles grumbled.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?”
“Tonight. Come back tonight.”
“If I can,” she promised. “Now do as you’re told while you’re here. Promise me?”
He merely grunted. As she passed Judd in the doorway she took care not to brush against him, a fact that wasn’t totally lost on Judd, judging by the expression on his face.
“I’ll wait for you downstairs,” she said, desperate for some air.
“Sit, sit.” Charles gestured to the chair beside his bed.
Judd did as he was told. His relief at seeing Charles alert again was palpable, but even he couldn’t answer himself as to why. Was it because he wanted his father to be fully aware of the payback he had coming to him, or was it something else?
“What, nothing to say?” Charles asked with a bark of laughter.
“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” Judd said stiffly.
Charles snorted. “I’ll accept that, it’s probably all I deserve. There’s one thing about facing your own mortality. It makes you want to clear away the messes you’ve made of your life—and believe me, I’ve made a few.”
“It’s how we deal with the messes that’s most important,” Judd replied, fighting to keep his voice neutral. Did his father plan to apologize? Did he think that saying “sorry” would make everything okay?
“That’s why I needed to speak to you now. You need to know the truth about your mother and me.”
“I think I know enough,” Judd said, stonewalling.
“No, you don’t know the half of it. I will admit it was my fault our marriage failed. I knew what I was getting into by marrying someone so much younger than me, I knew she deserved more than an older man could offer.” Charles sighed and lapsed into silence.
Judd shifted uncomfortably on his chair, waiting for the older man to finish what he wanted to say. He didn’t have to wait too long.
“I won’t beat around the bush, my boy. I wasn’t man enough for her. Now don’t go getting all embarrassed. I know kids don’t want to hear about their parents’ sex lives.” He made a self-conscious grimace. “I promise to keep it PG. Do you know much about diabetes?”
“Not a huge amount, no.”
“Mine went undiagnosed for many years—part of the reason I’m here now. But one of the issues I suffer with the disease is impotence. I was thirty-five when I married your mother and I was already beginning to have problems. She was only nineteen when I met her and such a beauty. I wanted to offer her the moon and the stars. I was prepared to give her anything just to keep her. But when I started having problems in the bedroom I was ashamed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it—not her, not my best friend, not my doctor, no one. I just threw myself into work. By the time Nicole came along we were barely sleeping together anymore.
“I just kept on working, kept on providing for Cynthia. She had the house, she had you and your sister. I just went on, hoping against hope it would be enough to keep her. She wasn’t happy, but I didn’t know what I could do to change that anymore. Your mother and my best friend always did get on, and Thomas seemed to be hell-bent on cheering Cynthia up. I got jealous. Started to suspect them of having an affair, of both of them cheating on me.
“One day I came home from work early. Thomas had already left the office and I found him in your mother’s room, holding her, as if they were about to make love. I accused them of all sorts of things. I didn’t listen when they tried to explain. Turns out she was desperately unhappy and he was consoling her, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. I lost a helluva lot that day. My wife, my best friend, my son.”
“You didn’t have to send us away,” Judd said bitterly. “She wasn’t unfaithful to you, was she?”
“No,” Charles acknowledged, his voice so soft Judd had to lean forward to hear him clearly. “She wasn’t. But she let me believe she had been. She told me you were Thomas’s child. That she and Thomas had been having an affair for years and how much he satisfied her. She knew exactly how to hit me where it would hurt the most.
“You know the rest. I could barely see, I was so angry. I told her she could go and take you with her. I never wanted to see either of you again. When Thomas heard what I’d done, he tried to reason with me, to get me to believe the truth, but Cynthia’s lies were already rotting my heart and my mind. I wouldn’t listen and we never spoke again.
“He died just over a year ago. He’d arranged for his lawyers to pass on a letter to me, should he predecease me. A letter where he told me what an idiot I’d been and how he’d never touched Cynthia, ever. I knew that if he was telling the truth I’d wasted twenty-five years on a hatred I’d had no right to feel. I had to know the truth, but it took a warning from my doctors about my health before I actually found the courage to reach out to you—to admit I was wrong. It wasn’t an easy thing.”
Judd didn’t know what to say. Everything his father told him made sense. Instinctively he knew, even though he didn’t want to believe it was the truth, that Cynthia was quite capable of being so spiteful as to spin out a lie of such enormous proportions. But why had she allowed it to go on for so long? Why had she been prepared to walk away from her marriage? And had she never considered, ever, what it had meant to him to be rejected by his father—for his sister to grow up without a mother?
“Judd.” Charles shifted and reached a hand toward him. Judd took it, intensely aware of the papery texture of his father’s hand and remembering a time when it was strong and warm as it guided him the first time he’d ridden his bike without training wheels. “I want you to know I’m sorry, son. So very sorry for everything I put you through. I was an inflexible, prideful fool. I can’t get back what I threw away, but I hope that now you know the truth you can find it in your heart to forgive me and that maybe we can start anew from here.”
Judd felt unexpected moisture prick at his eyes. Every wish he’d ever had was here before him. His father was reaching out, wanting to make amends for the past. Charles had talked about his own bitterness being a waste of the last twenty-five years, but what of Judd’s own? Channeling his own anger against his father for so long had been just as destructive as his father’s toward Cynthia and Thomas Jackson.
“Is that why you offered me the controlling share in the company as well as the house? To make it up to me? Did you really think that would be enough?”
Charles nodded. “I hoped so. I knew you were already successfully running The Masters’. I had to sweeten the bait to bring you home—where you belong. I thought that once you were here that we could start to build a bridge between the past and now. To learn to be father and son again.”
He’d come so close to throwing it all away. To destroying everything his father had worked so hard to build.
“Thank you for telling me. It’s a lot to take in after all this time. I’ve been very angry at you for most of my life.”
“I deserved that. Are you still angry?”
“Yes, but it’s different now—there’s more regret than anger. Frustration, too. I just wish things could have been different.”
“They can be. We can make it so.”
“Yes,” Judd said, squeezing his father’s hand gently. “Yes, Dad. We can.”
By the time Judd joined Anna downstairs she felt as if she had herself back under control, externally at least. He’d been with his father for quite a while longer than she’d expected.
“What did you think?” she asked as they walked back to the car.
“He’s a tough old bird. I reckon he’ll be around for a few more years yet.”
“Did the nurse say anything to you about when he could go home? Supposing he has a home to go to, of course.”
Darn, she could probably h
ave handled that better, she thought. But it was too late now. The words hung between them like an invisible challenge.
“What makes you think he doesn’t?”
She looked at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding me, right? Cynthia and Charles under one roof? She’ll never allow it.”
“What she will and won’t allow isn’t an issue,” Judd said firmly as they reached the car.
“She seems to believe it is.”
“Well, there’s a lot that people believe at the moment. Not all of it is true,” he said.
His vagueness pushed Anna to speak again. “Are you saying that Cynthia lied to me on Friday night? That it wasn’t your intention to turf Charles out and install your mother back where she so supremely believes she belongs?”
“I’m not admitting or denying anything. Charles will have a home to go to—that’s all you need to worry about for now.”
Anna lapsed into silence, frustrated by Judd’s stonewalling tactics. They were nearing their office block before she spoke again.
“I’m going to look for another job. I can’t work with you. Not now. Not knowing what you’re really like.”
“That’s your choice, but do you really think the timing is right to leave just now? Without Charles and Nicole, you’re pretty much it for historical knowledge and continuity around the place. Anyone would think you want to see Wilson Wines collapse into dust.”
“That’s not fair. You can’t expect me to keep working with you, not now that we—”
“Not now that we what, Anna?”
“Nothing.”
“And your resignation?”
“I will wait until Charles is better. That’s all I’m promising for now.”
The thought of leaving Wilson Wines, the only job she’d ever known, terrified her. But she couldn’t continue there, working for Judd, seeing him every day. Wanting him every minute.
Fourteen
Judd’s head was reeling. The last thing he needed to deal with right now was Anna walking out on him. If anything, he needed her back home where she belonged as well, but he knew he had some hard work to do in that department before she’d even consider it.
What occupied his mind first and foremost now was something else. Something that challenged every belief he’d grown up with. Logically he’d always known there were two sides to every story, but he’d never dreamed his father’s side of things could be so different to what he’d always been told. He’d wanted to refute the words that had poured from his father’s mouth, but the man was virtually on his deathbed. Charles had no reason to lie and even with what Judd had always held to be the truth, there was a ring of honesty to what his father had said that demanded he give his old man full justice.
He couldn’t concentrate on his work in the office and surprised Anna by telling her he was leaving for the day.
“Call me at the house if you need me.”
“I won’t,” she said bluntly.
He could only give an ironic smile in response. Tough to do when what he really wanted was to lean across her desk and kiss her so thoroughly she would forget what day of the week it was. He’d save that for another time, though. Right now, he had more pressing business to attend to.
Fifteen minutes later, as he pulled into the driveway, he stopped and stared at the massive stone structure that dominated the property. He shook his head. It was only a building—yet it was so coveted, and at what cost? He eased his foot off the brake and slowly drove up the driveway. A van was parked near the front door and he pulled up alongside it, frowning as he read the lettering on the side. Decorators? He shook his head as he got out of the car and let himself in through the front door.
He could hear Cynthia in the salon and the softer murmur of another woman’s voice answering her. When he opened the salon door, both women looked up, his mother’s face wreathing in a smile of welcome.
“Judd, you’re home early! What a lovely surprise. Here, you can tell me what you think of these.” Spread before her were a stack of open books of decorating samples and she picked up a selection from the top, handing them toward him. “I think these will be perfect in here, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t,” he said grimly before turning to the other woman. “I’m sorry, but it seems my mother has wasted your time. We won’t be needing any decorating advice at the moment. Let me see you out.”
The other woman looked shocked, but to her credit she hastily gathered her samples in her arms, shooting worried glances between Judd and his mother as she did so.
Cynthia sat in mutinous silence, her dark brows drawn in a straight line—a harbinger of her temper. She would never argue with him in front of a stranger but he had no doubt that her blood pressure was rising to monumental proportions right now. If there was one thing his mother hated, it was being thwarted in her goals.
Let her be angry, he thought. It was nothing compared to how he was feeling right now. By the time he’d shown the decorator out and returned to the salon, his body was rigid with tension.
“How could you do that to me, and in front of a total stranger?” She rose to her feet and demanded the instant he’d closed the door behind him.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” he said calmly. Strangely enough, in the face of her fury, he began to feel himself settle down by degrees. “The house is still mine.”
“Don’t you dare tell me after all this time you’re changing your mind. This house is mine by right, it always has been. I just bet it’s that upstart, Anna Garrick. Has she been poisoning your mind all morning? That type will always try, you know. They cloud your judgment with sexual favors and then they try to pull your strings for the rest of your life.”
“Is that what you tried to do with Charles?” he asked pointedly.
Slap! In all his life his mother had never struck him, but it appeared he’d crossed a line with her today. Judd tested his stinging jaw and locked his gaze with hers.
“Now that’s out of the way, perhaps you could answer my question.”
“How dare you!”
“No, Mother, how dare you lie to me all these years. What kind of mother lies about her son’s paternity and deliberately keeps a boy from his father?”
“Whatever I did, I did for you, Judd. I love you.”
“Inasmuch as you’re capable of loving anyone more than you love yourself, and this house.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I think I do. I understand you were young and foolish when you met Charles and that you saw in him a chance to relive the former Masters glory that you had pined for all your life.” He shook his head. “Why did you lie to him, Mother? Why did you let him drive us away? Was it really worth hurting him so badly?”
“We’d grown apart. After I had Nicole it was as if he lost all interest in me as a woman. At first he said he was having to work longer hours and didn’t want to disturb me, but then it became another excuse, and then another until we weren’t even sharing a room anymore.”
Judd knew his mother better than probably anyone else, and he knew that, for Cynthia, losing Charles’s attentions would have been a dreadful blow to her self-esteem. For a woman who appeared so strong, she was more fragile than others knew. She measured herself by the success around her. If the physical side of her marriage was failing, then she was a failure.
“Why did you lie to him about Thomas Jackson?”
“You know about Thomas?”
“Only Charles’s side. Now I want to hear yours. The truth this time.”
His mother began to pace the room, every now and then stopping to finger one ornament or another.
“You don’t know what it was like. Charles was such a dashing man when he came to visit us at The Masters’ that time. And he was clear
ly smitten with me. The age gap didn’t seem ridiculous to me—he was such a charismatic and vital man. He promised me everything I’d ever wanted. He promised me this.” She flung her arms out wide before wrapping them tight around her middle. “He made me feel as if his entire world revolved around me. But then, he started pulling away.
“I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. I had no other family here. He was my everything, and suddenly he didn’t want me anymore. I just wanted to make him jealous. To make him want me again. So, I turned to someone else for attention, to show him that if he didn’t want me, another man would.”
“But his best friend? What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking, that much is quite obvious. Thomas could see there was a growing rift between Charles and me. He loved us both and wanted to do whatever he could to help us over our rough patch, as he called it. I, shamefully, took advantage of his friendship and used it against him. I just wanted to hurt Charles any way I could at that point. I didn’t realize then just how much I would end up hurting everyone else. When Charles threatened to send me back to Australia alone, I overreacted. I couldn’t lose you and Nicole as well as my home and my marriage. I lied to him about Thomas being my lover and I led Charles to believe it was Thomas who was your father.”
Cynthia sighed deeply and sank into a nearby chair. A glance at her face told of the toll her honesty had taken on her after all these years of perpetuating a lie.
Judd chose his words carefully. “They never spoke again, did you know that? Charles refused to see or speak to Thomas for the rest of his life, despite his best friend’s repeated entreaties. You destroyed their friendship as thoroughly as if you really had slept with Thomas Jackson. It was only when Thomas died recently that Charles began to wonder if Thomas had really been telling the truth all along.”
She nodded and wiped an errant tear from one eye. Judd wasn’t moved by her unexpected emotional display. He wasn’t even convinced it was genuine until she looked up and met the censure in his eyes. For the first time she showed every one of her fifty-one years and then some.
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