by Emma Darcy
Triumph…greed…something glittered in the amber eyes that was at odds with Laura’s supposed desperation, although the glitter was quickly swallowed up by another gush of tears. ‘I hate asking this of you…’ She blotted up the moisture with a tissue, blinked rapidly, took a deep breath and gabbled, ‘Maybe a lump sum settlement would be best. I could go away, make a life for my child somewhere else, a more simple existence…’
‘How much, Laura?’ Chloe bored in, hating this scene.
She wrung her hands, looked distracted, then hesitantly, pleadingly answered, ‘If you could write me a cheque for fifty thousand dollars…’
Fifty thousand!
The sheer boldness of it floored Chloe for a moment. Had she been such a walkover person in the past? Apply emotional pressure and she’d buckle to it every time? No mind of her own? Is that what Laura had been counting on?
However, there was still the baby to be considered.
‘I won’t hand out that amount of money, Laura,’ she said decisively. ‘I will talk to my lawyer about your situation and get him to talk to Tony’s lawyer…’
‘But that could take weeks…months…I’m down to the dregs of my bank account now,’ she wailed.
‘I assure you something will be done to persuade Tony into shouldering his responsibility within days,’ Chloe said with steely resolve, rising from the dining table to put an end to the distasteful conversation.
‘He won’t…he won’t,’ she cried, remaining seated and burying her face in her hands.
Luther, who’d also sprung to his feet as Chloe had risen to hers, started barking at her to get up, too. Laura ignored him. Chloe sighed impatiently, shushed Luther and spoke very firmly, ‘I promise you, something will be done about getting child support to you one way or another. There’s no more to be said, Laura.’
‘Oh, please, Chloe…’ She stumbled up from her chair-a picture of wretched despair. ‘Don’t send me away with nothing. I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Was that a threat of suicide?
Luther started barking again, not liking whatever his instincts were picking up.
‘If you could just give me a cheque for five thousand,’ Laura begged.
Chloe didn’t like it but she was troubled enough to go to her handbag and extract five hundred dollars from her purse. She held out the notes to Laura. ‘That’s all I have on hand. It should help enough until other money comes through for you.’
She took the money, though still pressing for more. ‘I could cash a cheque…’
‘No. I’ve promised to act on your behalf and I’ll keep my word. That’s it, Laura. I want you to leave now.’
Chloe headed off down the hallway to open the front door. Luther stayed behind to bark at Laura until she followed. Which she did, weeping so noisily, Chloe felt it was a deliberate attempt to weaken her resolve. Though it might not be. She hated this. It was churning her up, making it difficult to cling to her sense of rightness in how she had acted.
Laura paused in the doorway to start pleading pitifully again.
‘No, stop!’ Chloe cried, completely out of patience. ‘Don’t come here again, Laura. I won’t be swayed into doing any more for you.’
Amazingly, her screwed-up face suddenly smoothed out. The leaking eyes flashed fury. She lashed out, not the slightest wobble in her voice. ‘What are a few measly thousands to you when you’re feathering your nest with Max Hart’s billions? Next to nothing!’ The vicious tone turned into wheedling. ‘This is so bad of you, Chloe, sending me off with a pittance, not caring about the baby…’
Luther growled and jumped at Laura’s legs, making her scuttle onto the porch away from him. Chloe immediately shut the door and locked it, breathing a grateful sigh of relief. She bent and scooped the little terrier up in her arms. ‘Good dog, saving me again,’ she crooned, petting him lovingly as she headed for the backyard, wanting as much distance as possible between her and Laura Farrell.
Her head was throbbing and her insides felt all twisted up. So many times in the past she had given in to whatever was being demanded of her, needing to end this awful inner turmoil, but she didn’t feel bad about not giving in to Laura. This was Tony’s fault, not hers. Tony’s responsibility. Laura’s, too. It was wrong that she should be expected to fix the situation.
Although she would call her lawyer and set up a meeting with Tony. One way or another, he had to be made to give his child appropriate support.
Max parked his Audi outside Chloe’s terrace house at Centennial Park and wished once again she was still living with him at Vaucluse. He’d liked having her on hand, liked the sense of going home to her. He knew it was important to her to be independent of him, knew he should be pleased about it for her sake, but it didn’t please him.
It pleased him even less when he went inside and listened to her account of Laura Farrell’s visit and the outcome of it with Chloe involving herself with Tony Lipton again. It was pointless telling her she shouldn’t have given any money to Laura. The baby was the big issue with Chloe. Max suspected it was always going to be a big issue-one that would inevitably separate them if he didn’t rethink his life.
‘Anyhow, I told my lawyer I wanted urgent action on this and he’s set up a meeting with Tony in his office tomorrow,’ she finished with a grimace of distaste. ‘It’s going to be horrid but I can’t just forget it, Max.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It will play on your mind until it’s settled. But don’t assume Laura told you the truth, Chloe. There’s something very fishy about her story.’
Like a lot of emotional pressure for the big handout-a very clever piece of manipulation that Chloe might have fallen for a few months ago, the kind of manipulation Laura would undoubtedly have seen used on Chloe by both Stephanie Rollins and Tony.
She laughed. ‘Luther didn’t like the smell of it, either.’
Max smiled. ‘I made a good choice, getting him for you. Worth his weight in gold.’
‘Absolutely!’ She wound her arms around his neck, her lovely face tilted up to his, eyes shining pleasure in his gift. ‘You have a happy knack of getting everything right, Max.’
He slid his arms around her waist, drawing her closer. ‘Would you like me to go with you tomorrow? Help sort things out with Tony?’
‘No. This is something I should do myself.’ Her mouth curled into an ironic smile. ‘I can’t expect you to protect me forever.’
The urge to do precisely that was very strong. Max found it difficult to back off from it. Probably his intense dislike of her ex-husband was driving it. He didn’t want Chloe meeting with the slime. Yet the encounter with Laura Farrell had definitely demonstrated she could no longer be influenced into doing anything she didn’t feel was right. She was no-one’s fool anymore, and he had no right to fray her confidence in handling a situation which she saw as her business.
‘Besides, I should be perfectly safe in my lawyer’s office,’ she insisted.
‘True,’ he conceded. ‘I’m worried about when you leave it. If Tony turns nasty…’ No mental strength could fight superior physical strength. Chloe needed him to protect her.
She frowned, fretting over the very real possibility that Tony could try physical force on her until a solution struck. ‘I know. I’ll call Gerry Anderson, ask him to take me to the lawyer’s office and bring me home. Gerry’s a very good security guard.’
An independent solution.
Little by little she was separating herself from him.
Soon she wouldn’t need him at all, although wanting him was still strong. He made sure it would stay strong, pouring every bit of his sexual expertise into their love-making later in the evening. Afterwards she cuddled up to him with a satisfied sigh and murmured, ‘You know, Max, I’m not with you because I want to feather my nest with your billions. You don’t think that, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. Never would with you, Chloe.’
She snuggled down contentedly, accepting his word without question.
Wouldn’t want to, either.
Her heart and mind were now geared to making the choices that felt right to her-running her own race.
To keep her he had to make himself her choice.
The hell of it was he wanted her to share everything with him, wanted to share everything with her. Running his own race into the future looked very empty without her at his side. Even Hill House felt empty without her there to come home to.
Max had never thought of his life as dark. A deep sense of purpose had driven it forward from nothing to everything he wanted. But Chloe lit him up inside with her lovely, shining, artless personality and all he had valued in the past-the brilliance of his achievements-lost its gloss compared to what she made him feel.
The plain truth was he didn’t have everything he wanted.
Chloe was slipping away from him and he wanted more of her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DESPITE Chloe’s determination to set things right, she felt very nervous about the confrontation with Tony. He was sure to be angry and spiteful, and although their respective lawyers would be at the meeting-hopefully keeping the situation calm and orderly-having to face her husband again was not a pleasant prospect.
‘I can feel your tension, Miss Rollins,’ Gerry Anderson remarked caringly as they set out on the drive into the city. ‘Want to spell out the problem so I’ll know what to watch out for?’
He was a nice man. She had always felt comfortable with him. It was easy to tell him what had happened with Laura Farrell and the purpose of this meeting with her husband.
‘May I give you a piece of advice?’ he said when she’d finished.
‘Please do.’
‘Miss Farrell was using every angle she could to milk you. Sounds like a very practised con lady to me and I’ve had a lot of experience with that kind of person. Don’t be surprised if she’s already milked Mr Lipton for all she could get.’
‘You mean she lied to me about Tony not giving her anything?’ It was a stunning thought.
‘I’m just saying it’s a possibility. For my money, she was going after the cream with you.’ He shot her a smile of approval. ‘I’m glad you didn’t fall for it.’
Chloe grimaced. ‘I did give her five hundred dollars.’
‘Not too bad a loss. And it made you feel better, which was fair enough. I think you’ll probably have to accept it as a loss. I doubt you’ll get it back from Mr Lipton. In fact, I think you should listen carefully to his side of the situation before accusing him of anything.’ He glanced a quick appeal at her. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes. Thank you, Gerry,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I really appreciate your advice.’
He smiled and nodded. ‘Glad to be of assistance to you, Miss Rollins.’
‘I’m glad I called you. I feel more…more prepared now.’
‘I’ll be right on hand if you run into any trouble,’ he assured her.
‘Thank you,’ she said on a sigh of relief.
Having parked the car under the Opera House, Gerry escorted her up Castlereigh Street to her lawyer’s chambers and settled himself in the legal secretary’s office, right outside the door to the boardroom where the meeting was to be held. Tony and his lawyer were already there when hers walked her in.
The men were dressed in sober dark grey suits. She’d also worn a suit-a light pink linen-and after the preliminary formal greetings, Tony complimented her on it, smiling at her as though he was delighted to be in her company again.
‘You look lovely, Chloe,’ he said, throwing her into confusion with his charming manner.
She looked at the lawyers in agitated appeal. ‘Let’s get down to business, shall we?’
They sat at a long boardroom table, each party on opposite sides.
Tony leaned forward, hands outstretched in appeal as he earnestly stated, ‘Laura lied to you, Chloe. She lied to me. She’s not pregnant. Never was. It was all a lie.’
She’d been prepared for lies but not this. Nothing like this. Her mind reeled with shock. ‘But…but I saw her. She had a baby bump. Four or five months…’
‘Clever padding, I promise you,’ Tony asserted. ‘When the other guy she’d tricked contacted me, I insisted that Laura accompany me to a doctor to have the pregnancy confirmed. She wouldn’t do it, carrying on about me not trusting her, trying to get me to back off from having proof of pregnancy. No way. She’s done this before. Blackmail and fraud.’
Chloe stared at him, barely able to take in what he was saying. She kept seeing Laura standing on her front porch in profile, her pregnancy on obvious show. Was Tony spinning a story to suit himself?
‘What other guy?’ she asked, finally homing in on his back-up proof for the accusation of blackmail and fraud.
‘He’d read the story about our break-up in the newspapers. Laura Farrell’s part in it. He thought about it for a while, then decided to contact me, said he didn’t want another one of her suckers to suffer as he had, didn’t want her to get away with it again.’ Tony gestured to his lawyer. ‘Show Chloe his statutory declaration.’
The lawyer opened a manila folder and passed her a sheaf of documents. On top was a statutory declaration, made by a John Dennis Flaherty with a Perth address, not anyone she knew or imagined Tony would know since he lived on the other side of Australia. Still, it was entirely possible that newspapers over there had picked up on a juicy celebrity scandal, so that part was credible.
She began reading.
According to John Flaherty, Laura Farrell had been his personal assistant four years ago. She had seductively maneuvred him into a sexual relationship although he loved his wife and had no intention of breaking up his marriage, which he’d made clear to Laura Farrell, who had apparently accepted this situation until she told him she had accidentally fallen pregnant, subsequently pressing him to leave his wife. He refused, ending the affair and offering only to pay support for their child. Laura Farrell went to his wife, begging her to dump him so they could be married. His wife divorced him. He had nothing more to do with Laura Farrell except to pay out a substantial settlement to get her out of his life. A year later he decided he wanted to see his child. He hired a private investigator to track down Laura Farrell. The investigator discovered there was no child and no medical record of there ever being a pregnancy let alone a birth.
Photocopies of the investigator’s reports followed. On being questioned, Laura Farrell had declared the money was a personal gift-‘a kiss-off’-and there was no proof of anything else. It was her word against his-the ex-wife would not testify on his behalf because he had admitted infidelity-so no legal action for fraud could be taken to recover the money.
It was a nasty story, making Chloe’s spine crawl over how Laura had come to her-the wife-forcing the marriage break-up then playing on her sympathy, playing every emotional string she could, making herself out to be Tony’s victim. Chloe wondered if the substantial settlement had been fifty thousand dollars-not a bad take for a bit of pregnancy padding.
‘Laura didn’t suck you in, did she?’ Tony asked anxiously. ‘You didn’t shell out a lot of money to her?’
She slowly raised her gaze from the documents to look directly at him. ‘No. I thought you should. Which is why we’re here.’
His face sagged with relief. ‘At least she didn’t do us that damage.’
It sounded as though he was wiping all fault from himself and Chloe was not about to accept that, eyeing him coldly as she pointed out, ‘You put us in this position, Tony. You gave her the power to play this game.’
‘Do you think I haven’t cursed myself a thousand times for falling into her trap?’ he pleaded.
‘Laura said you seduced her.’
‘Well, she would say that to you, wouldn’t she?’ he scoffed. ‘It served her purpose. Just as it served her purpose to hang out availability signals to me from day one of working for you. Flirtatious looks. Sexy double entendres. The occasional brush past. A w
hole stack of sly temptations. I laughed it off for months. I didn’t want her.’
Again he leaned forward earnestly, his blue eyes begging her understanding. ‘I had you, Chloe. I didn’t want Laura Farrell. Even when she was doing it to me I told myself I should be stopping her, but I’d had too much to drink at the party and…’ He raked his hands through his hair in an anguished manner. ‘I tell you, Chloe, she’s a female predator. I was coming out of the bathroom. She pushed me back in, had me unzipped in a flash, went down on me and…’
‘Spare me the details!’ Chloe snapped.
‘I’m sorry…sorry…I’m just trying to explain how it was, how I never meant it to happen. I love you,’ he cried emphatically.
Anger flared at the way he was twisting things again. Whether Laura had seduced him or the other way around didn’t really matter because it hadn’t stopped in that bathroom. Her eyes savagely mocked any excuse for his continued infidelity.
‘Don’t tell me this was a once only lapse on your part, Tony. I know it wasn’t.’
‘What did Laura tell you?’ he quickly countered.
Chloe shot down any more lies before he could come up with them. ‘My mother told me. She dismissed the affair as unimportant. The affair, Tony. Not a one-night stand.’
Chloe could see him recalculating, knowing he was under the gun with Stephanie Rollins’s sharp eyes never missing anything. It wouldn’t suit her purpose to plead his cause so he had to give the affair a forgivable twist.
‘All right,’ he conceded with a self-deprecating grimace. ‘Laura knew how to work sex to get to me and it did. Any man would have taken what she was giving out. I’m only human, Chloe. But it made me feel guilty as hell and in the end I did stop it because I cared about our marriage and didn’t want her messing with it.’
She wondered if Max would have taken what Laura could do with sex. Obviously Tony had found it more exciting than what he’d had at home. Was sex more important to men than love? Perhaps the reason why Max had never married was because sex with the one woman got boring after a while, and he preferred to remain free to go after something new and exciting when the urge took him.