A Heart's End - A Billionaire Romance Novel (Romance, Billionaire Romance, Life After Love Book 6)

by Nancy Adams

  Once she’d finished the drinks, she set Claire’s tea down in front of her and then brought over a white box with Darcey’s written on the side of it.

  “I brought cake for us,” June said. “Like we always used to eat together. You remember that?”

  “Of course, Ma. I still remember that.”

  Her mother took two plates from the cupboard and placed one down in front of Claire and the other at her own place, then two forks. Once she was seated herself, June flipped open the box to reveal two chocolate cupcakes. She placed one on her daughter’s plate and then the other on her own, looked up at Claire and said, “Eat up.”

  Claire picked up her fork, the thing feeling unusually heavy in her grasp, and gazed down at the cake with a gentle frown, her stomach twisting all the more when the aroma of the cake’s chocolate struck her nostrils. Meanwhile, across from her, June was digging into hers with relish.

  As she was chewing, she stopped and gazed over at Claire.

  “You not hungry?” she inquired.

  “Sure,” Claire stammered in reply, digging her fork down into the cake, taking a piece of it up and shoveling it into her mouth. The first thing she noticed was that the taste of it was so foreign to her. She’d enjoyed Darcey’s cakes since her mother had fed them to her as a baby, but this tasted different; dead almost. Like it tasted of nothing, and she quickly realized that it was her taste buds that weren’t responding, and not the cake itself. It was so tasteless in her mouth, and the more she moved it around with her tongue, the more her stomach ached and she felt that her throat would close up. She attempted to swallow and almost choked, her gag reflex summoned, and she coughed, very nearly spitting the whole piece out and struggling with all her might to get it down, taking a slug of tea to wash it away.

  As she struggled, her mother looked at her in astonishment.

  “Are you ill?” she asked. “Has all of this business with Sam Burgess made you ill?”

  “Maybe,” Claire stuttered in between her coughs. “I’m just not so hungry at the moment is all.”

  “Perhaps you should leave the cake, before you spit it all over the table!”

  “Yeah,” Claire replied as she placed her fork back down on her plate.

  June held her eyes firmly on Claire, and Claire felt unable to meet their gaze, her expression meek as she looked down at the cake.

  “You’ve come to tell me something, haven’t you?” June put to her daughter. “Something new.”

  Claire’s heart felt something grip it and her stomach almost erupted.

  “Yes,” she replied weakly, still not looking up at her mother.

  “I had a presentiment that there was more to all this than you were letting on. I sensed a cunning in my daughter recently that I’d never felt before. And now you want to come here and get it all off of your chest. Well, why should I stop you? Tell me everything.”

  Claire took in a gulp of air, having not breathed since her mother had begun speaking.

  “I came to tell you…though, I’m really not sure where to begin,” Claire started in a trembling voice. “I guess you need to know about my losing my virginity to Sam…”

  “Not the details,” her mother put to her with a slight grimace.

  “When I began at the Hospice,” Claire continued, “I’d never been with anyone intimately…Well, not in the sense that it was…But I’m drifting from things. When I met Sam I was pure and always planned to lose it to my true love—”

  “As much as I didn’t want the grubby details, I also don’t want any romance either—just the hard facts.”

  “But that is a hard fact: that I loved him then, love him now and have always loved him with all my heart. That’s what has driven all of this: my heart.”

  “Even your callous treatment of those around you? Your wasting five years of Paul’s life, when all the time your heart was with someone else?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Paul. After Sam and me split all those years ago, I expected to never see him again—”

  “Why did you split?” June interrupted.

  Claire gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, as if something might be there that could somehow give her the answers to her mother’s questions.

  Looking down from the ceiling and back at June, she began, “His wife died and we both felt the full weight of the shame that we had placed on ourselves by deceiving her. Everything was impossible. How could I drop everything to be with him? He was so distraught about losing Marya—”

  “Not distraught enough to help himself from cheating on her, though,” June snapped in.

  Claire closed her eyes tight and a teardrop fell from one of them.

  “You think it was all so easy, don’t you?” she said to her mother, seeing the sight of Marya there behind her closed eyelids, in the bed, that terrible night she’d lost her hearing, the poor woman gripping onto her husband and daughter with all her failing strength. “We fell in love at the worst time possible,” Claire went on. “We found each other in the dark. I was in such darkness back then and so was he.”

  “What darkness were you in?” June suddenly inquired. “You’ve always had a loving home here. What darkness do you come from?”

  The question bit into Claire’s heart and she felt a wave of fury move through her. But she steadied herself and instead answered calmly.

  “I was very sad back then,” she began in a wavering voice. “One day maybe I’ll tell you, but—”

  “There you go again. More secrets. ‘One day I’ll tell you,’ she says. I’m your mother, sweetie. I’ve loved you from the day the doctor told me that I was expecting; since the time the midwife placed you in my hands and I felt you for the first time. Haven’t I brought you up with love and respect? Have I ever given you a reason to suspect me in any way?”

  “No,” Claire stammered, wiping tears from her eyes.

  “Then why won’t you let me inside? Why keep all these secrets from me? Why lie more and more to me? Every day is a lie because you can’t tell me the secrets in your heart and have to keep on lying to protect them.”

  “Then let me tell you this one,” Claire put to her in exasperation.

  “Okay then: tell me.”

  Claire didn’t waste another breath, she said, “After Sam and I split up, I found out that I was pregnant.”

  Boom! As if a canon had gone off in her ear, June Prior’s eyes widened and she glared across the table at her daughter.

  Without letting her mother speak, Claire continued, “At first I wanted to abort it.”

  “That’s a sin,” June whispered to herself, her hand now across her mouth.

  “But I didn’t. I walked out at the last moment and decided to have the child.”

  “That was why you had to retake the second year; you didn’t retake it: you cancelled it and had the baby.”

  Claire merely nodded sadly.

  “But the letter we received from the college saying you’d failed?”

  “Paul and me had a friend of ours make a fake letter. I’d already canceled the year and had the child by then.”

  “So Paul knew of all of this?”

  “He did, but was only protecting me by not telling you.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was heavily pregnant when I met up with him in Maine, so he had to know.”

  “And what about the child? What of my grandchild?”

  “He was born a boy,” Claire said tearfully in answer, “and I saw him once before he was taken into care by an adoption agency.”

  “My word! You mean to say that out there somewhere I have a grandson?”

  “Yes,” Claire said, looking away from her mother’s eyes and retraining her own on the half-eaten cake.

  “And does Sam Burgess know about this? Did you ever tell him?”

  “He never knew until two days ago when Paul told him.”

  “And this is why you and he are at odds now?”

  “Yes.”

  “My word!” June e
xclaimed, shaking her head, her eyes trained on her moping daughter, before she suddenly added in a stern tone, “You know none of this can come out.”

  Looking up at her, Claire replied with indignation, “You think I want it to?”

  Gazing blankly ahead, and not at her daughter at all, June went on, “Your father is at a critical time in this political career. This is something he really wants and a scandal like this will blow it all apart. He knows nothing of any of this and if he were to find out that I knew, he would think that I colluded with you somehow.”

  “Ma, I don’t give a rat’s ass about dad’s political career.”

  June bolted up from her chair so sharply that she knocked it over.

  “Don’t you ever talk of your father like that,” she raged. “You go around sleeping with billionaires behind their dying wives’ backs and then have their bastard children—”

  June stopped herself. Her harsh tone had taken her by surprise and the spite that she felt for her daughter in that moment had shocked and horrified her. She was about to apologize, but Claire spoke first in an angry tone and through furious tears.

  “You asked earlier about what darkness existed in my life back then when me and Sam first got together?” she began with hateful scorn. “You wanted to know what other secrets I held from you—and everyone else? Then I’ll tell you,” she added with fury in her voice, stooping across the table and looking her mother straight in the eyes. “It was that very same person that you just rebuked me about that put me in that darkness. That same man who you fear so much that you would deride me because of him put me in a world of darkness.”

  “What do you mean?” June stuttered.

  “Your husband Joe Prior is a pedophile.”

  “No,” June muttered, frozen to the spot, her eyes wide and pointed at the terrible expression on her daughter’s face.

  “It started when I was nine and didn’t stop until I was twelve. You were usually on a night shift when it happened, when he’d sneak into my room. But there were times when he showed daring and did it while you were fast asleep in the other room. I think you’d usually taken a lot of sleeping tablets; heck, maybe he’d drugged you.”

  “I can’t,” June continued to mutter from behind her hand.

  “Do you want to know what he used to do to me? Do you want to know about the time he threatened to kill me, you and Kyle—not to mention himself—if I ever told you? Do you want to know the true face of your husband? You always complain that you don’t know him—you used to complain about it much more, but of late, you’ve kept your complaints to yourself. I guess you simply accept him for who he is now. The only issue with that, of course, is that you didn’t actually know who he was at all, so you never actually accepted him in any true sense; you’d merely given up trying to find out who he really was. You simply accepted your lot. So with that same capacity for acceptance, I hope you can accept this lot.”

  With this final denouncement, Claire got up from her chair, feeling that this was perhaps her time to leave. She had told her mother far more than she should’ve, but now the she had, she felt rather pleased and wasn’t sure if this was a result of the contemptuous anger that her mother’s defense of her father had aroused, or if she was actually pleased that her mother now knew everything and there was no longer any secrets between them. Either way, she felt as if she had to leave the house this very minute.

  But as she went to leave, her mother did something that she would always claim she regretted the rest of her life.

  As Claire began walking from the kitchen, June, under the influence of bitter, haughty pride, rushed up to Claire and slapped her as hard as she could around the face, catching her on the cheek with her wedding ring. The blow knocked Claire to the side and June, tears now flowing freely from her, instantly felt horrid for it, standing there and breathing rapidly, her whole world seemingly disintegrating around her.

  Claire gave her mother one last contemptuous look, wiping blood from a small cut on her cheek, and then marched out of the house for possibly the last time.

  The moment she left, her mother collapsed onto the floor and didn’t regain consciousness for over an hour.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Having just arrived at the mansion from Colorado, Sam made his way to the top of the small vineyard at the back of the property. Once he was in the midst of it, he stood gazing out across the San Fernando Valley, his mind lost in continual thought. It was in this state that Karl brought John Ryan to see him.

  Glancing at them as they approached, Sam smiled and gave his hand to John to shake.

  “Good to see you, John,” he said as they shook hands firmly.

  “I wish it were under better circumstances,” the security man replied as Karl walked back to the house, leaving the two of them alone at the vineyard.

  “Me too. So what’s new?”

  “As I stated over the phone, the family have absconded from their address and are currently in Mexico. It may be a long shot, but coincidently Mr. Lee’s business partner is of Mexican extraction and has family down there. It could be possible that he has set the family up with a safe house. With that in mind, I have our guys monitoring all the communication activity from the business partner’s house in East L.A. There’s already several numbers based in Mexico that he’s regularly calling and it shouldn’t be long before we narrow them down to which one could be the Lees. Plus I’ve got people listening in on the phone calls; they’ll report back the moment they get anything. Trust me, this is gonna work out in our favor. We’ll track them down and hopefully we can help them.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said dreamily as he gazed at the rolling hills. “You get anything else on them? You said something on the phone about things you’d rather tell me in person.”

  “Yeah. I did a little digging around in the couples’ past and found out that Jules Lee has prior.”

  Sam turned to him sharply.

  “What type of prior?”

  “Manslaughter during a break in.”

  “What the fuck!?”

  “Look, Sam, he did his time, served his probation with distinction, got glowing reports from everyone from his prison warden to his parole officer. Plus the killing wasn’t as cut and thrust as I originally thought. I looked into the police report and it seems that in order to get out of the rain while traveling through Louisiana on motorbike, the Lees found refuge in some barn, breaking the lock to get in. After that, the property owner burst in on them with a shotgun, there was a struggle and Jules Lee killed the man with his own gun; he wasn’t armed himself. He served fifteen years and by all accounts—”

  “How could the state allow the couple to take the boy into their charge?”

  “It wasn’t exactly an adoption, merely a custody ruling, so the couple weren’t under quite so strict conditions. The crime was admitted by Jules himself and an investigator looked at both his prison report and his parole report. Like I said, both of them were glowing, so the state ruled that the couple could have custody.”

  “And now they’ve taken him on the run through Mexico?”

  “As I said on the phone, social services were going to give them the ultimatum that Juliette be taken into state care, or David would be. They clearly didn’t want to have to make that decision. They’re desperate, Sam; not criminals.”

  “You sound like you’re defending them?”

  “I spoke with one of their neighbors. They sound like nice folk that just haven’t had the right breaks. The wife got ill and they’re poor. They don’t want the family split up. I also looked into all of David’s school reports, etc., and he looks to be a healthy, normal, happy kid.”

  Just then, Ryan’s phone went off in his pocket and he answered it. Walking away from Sam, he muttered discreetly down the phone, appearing to be in deep conversation with someone. After a minute or so, he came off the phone and rejoined Sam.

  “I think we may have them,” John informed him the moment he had.

  CHAPTER THI
RTEEN

  Juliette awoke sitting in a chair in the middle of a large, moderately furnished Italian apartment. She instantly recognized the place as being Marco’s, and the moment she made her recollection, a scream made its way to her ears, coming from somewhere else. Feeling an instant terror grip her heart, she got up from the chair and ventured out of the room, down a corridor and toward where the screams appeared to be emerging from.

  The closer she got to the source, the more she recognized who they came from. It was Rosa.

  Rosa had been her best friend since they were little girls running around the woods and fields of Italy. Together they had been as thick as thieves, and had both run away to Rome to find better lives as singers. What awaited them, however, wasn’t stardom, but poverty and prostitution.

  When Juliette came to the door of the room, she pushed it gently and the thing swung open as if she had shoved it with all her might. Inside, she found a whole host of old faces from her past, all standing around a bed, terror in their expressions. Juliette pushed her way to the front and there she found Rosa, being held down by three of the oldest and most experienced girls, one holding her across the chest, and one at each knee, gripping her legs open as a doctor worked away between them. An imperceptible scream emerged from Juliette when she witnessed the river of blood that flowed around the doctor, piles of bloodied sheeting all around him. She felt even worse when she saw the pallid, terrified face of her friend, Rosa’s eyes bulging from their sockets and her greenish skin glistening with innumerable beads of sweat.

  Looking round the room, she saw the anguished looks that spread themselves on every face, some of those faces, belonging to the younger girls, hidden in the flanks of older ones. Juliette attempted to find her own face among them, knowing that she must surely be there herself, but she was stopped short when a terrible scream emerged from the bed, the worst yet, and she turned sharply in its direction.