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

by Nancy Adams

  “Now don’t expect much,” he advised her when they reached the gate of the place. “There’s no such thing as a hotel, let alone anything decent here. This place is my favorite and you’ll see why when we go inside.”

  They walked through the gate and continued along a narrow walkway for a moment before going through a doorway and down some little stone steps, emerging into a cramped living space where an old woman sat peeling potatoes and watching television.

  The moment they entered, the rather fat woman turned to them sharply with a stern look, her loose belly poking out of her bright purple sari. It was as if she were cross at them for interrupting, but when she saw Alex a light smile glittered her lips.

  “Ah! Friend,” she said with warmth, “you are back.”

  “You have rooms, didi?” he inquired of her.

  “Yes.”

  “At the front?”

  “Yes.”

  “Same same as last time?”

  “Same same as last time,” she repeated with a wiggle of her head.

  She listlessly got up, heaving her large bulk up with her, and showed them along a corridor of peeling, yellowed plaster. As she passed a door on the way, she banged it with her fist and pronounced, “Bathroom,” presumably for Jenna’s benefit. Once they reached the end, she pushed open the last door on the right and stood waiting for them both to duck down and enter. On the other side, Jenna found a cramped space with yellow walls that had turned dark brown in the corners from damp, a slight aroma of urine pervading everything, and one single bed against the wall, holding upon its meager frame a pancake of a mattress that was curled slightly at the ends. There were no windows and the only real feature of the cupboard-like cell was a door at the very end of the room covered over by a stained curtain that had been torn at the bottom.

  “I was thinking you can have this room as it’s the best,” Alex said to Jenna as he stood alongside her.

  “The best!?” she replied with an incredulous smile.

  “Yes, the best,” he stated firmly as he walked over to the curtain, slid it to one side and opened the door out onto a balcony that overlooked the whole of the river.

  Mesmerized and forgetting the condition of the room, Jenna walked to the door, ducked under its small frame and emerged out onto the little stone balcony, the thing built into the city wall itself, overlooking the stone steps and the wide river of little boats and people washing in the holy waters, pilgrims and tourists lining the steps.

  “Look to your left,” Alex suggested as he joined her.

  She did as he told her, and there, a little further along the giant riverbank, she saw great bales of smoke rising up into the air, merging with the blueish-gray hue of the sky. Underneath this up-pouring of smoke lay giant fires surrounded by people.

  “What are they burning?” she asked innocently.

  “That’s the main burning ghat: they’re burning the dead and then shoveling them into the waters to rejoin nature. People come from all around India, and indeed the world, to burn their loved ones here. It is an honor for them to be added to the waters of the great Ganges in the holiest of cities: Varanasi.”

  After that she took the room and Alex took one next door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Claire was awoken by the sound of her cell phone going off. She immediately thought that it was Sam, so she bounded out of bed and took ahold of it. However, when she looked at the screen, she saw that it was her mother.

  She was still at the Cliff Face, awaiting Sam’s return. As for Will, he’d been driven home by one of the rangers, having outstayed his welcome by winning a large sum of money off of them through the poker game.

  Claire picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Ma,” she answered sleepily.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” her mom cried into the phone, tears and exasperation in her voice.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asked, sitting bolt upright in bed.

  She had expected her mother to continue her chastisement, but the old woman sounded distraught.

  “I…went through your father’s…things,” June sobbed into the phone. “And I…I guess, I found some stuff…and I don’t…Oh! Claire, I’m so sorry.”

  “What did you find, Ma?”

  “I went onto his computer, but didn't find anything. Nothing on his laptop either. So I went into his safe in his study. He doesn’t even know I know the combination, he keeps it secret from me, but I found it out by accident one time. Anyway, I went in there, and that's where I found…I don’t know what's happening, sweetie.”

  June fell into wretched sobbing and it was some time before Claire could get her to continue.

  “There was a USB memory stick in there,” the mother went on. “I plugged it into his computer and on it…on it…OH, my God! Who is he, Claire? Who is my husband? How could he look at these things?”

  “What things, Ma? What things has he been looking at?”

  “Images of…images of, of children, Claire. Of naked girls no older than twelve, doing such horrible…I don’t know where to turn, I—I—”

  Again June weeped and by now, so too was her daughter, tears rapidly dropping from her long eyelashes.

  “Where are you, sweetie?” June asked.

  “I’m still in Colorado.”

  “At Beth’s place?”

  “No. I’m out in Sam’s reserve.”

  “Can’t you be here with me?”

  “Not right now. But I can by lunchtime.”

  “That’s too late. Your father’s away at the moment, but he’ll be back by midday. I was thinking to have it all out with him, and I was—”

  “No!” Claire snapped. “Don’t tell him you know. I want you to take his laptop and the USB to the police now, straight away. Call up Agnes and get her to go with you. Once you’ve finished in the police station, you go straight to Agnes’s. Do not go home or anywhere around Joe. I will come and get you by early afternoon.”

  “But I don’t know if I can,” her mother bleated.

  “Yes, you can,” Claire barked firmly down the phone. “You take that down to the police and you do what you should do, Ma. You’re a Christian. You should do what’s best in all situations like this. What would Christ do? He’d take that straight down there now without any further thought on the subject.”

  “But I’m not strong enough.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “But all those years he was, he was—doing, with you, I never saw it then. Or maybe I did…maybe I’m just weak. That's why I need you here now. We can confront him together.”

  Joe’s chilling threat came ringing in Claire’s ears: “I’ll go to your ma, then your brother and finally myself.”

  “You call Agnes now and go to the police station,” Claire cried into the phone. “I’ll call Beth now and make sure that her mother takes you to the police station. You breathe not one word of this to anyone until you see Sheriff Daniels. You give him everything and then let the police do their work. You pack a bag now and you don’t go home until Joe is behind bars.”

  “But he’s still my husband.”

  “Your husband, Ma, is a pedophile—a child abuser. I should have gone to the police myself long ago; I should have told you long ago, but I was a coward, and now I’m scared that he’s hurt others all because of my silence. If you have this out with him he’ll convince you not to go to the police somehow, he’ll use your love for him as a weapon and he’ll wriggle out of it. Or he’ll do something much worse.”

  “Oh, Lord give me strength.”

  “God is guiding you, Ma. He’s guiding you to help all of those girls you saw on that USB. He’s guiding you to stop the evil of Joe. He’s testing you. It could have only ever been you who would bring him down. Only you.”

  “But God also says to forgive.”

  “Then forgive him, but don’t spare him his punishment and chance of redemption. God does not impel us to harm children or to add to their abuse and abasement; it is the Devil who
has done that. God wills you to forgive him, but only after you have done your duty and stopped this man, stopped this demon.”

  June remained sobbing into the phone for some time.

  When she finally spoke, she said, “You’re right. You’re right. I’ll call Agnes now and begin packing.”

  “And you promise not to mention this to anyone else?”

  “I do.”

  “Not even Agnes. She might tell Clive, and then he might call up Joe. Just tell Agnes that you have to go to the police station to report an incident. Make up some story. Say that you saw an intruder in the garden last night and you want to make a report. Then tell her you don’t feel safe at home and that you want to stay at hers. That’s when I’ll come and get you.”

  “Oh, gosh! I don’t know if I can.”

  “MA! You gotta snap out of it and do the right thing. Now call Agnes and pack your stuff.”

  “But I feel so awful, honey.”

  “Ma,” Claire said in a solemn tone, weighing each word with added significance, “you’ve been braver than me. Much braver. He lied to me and said that there was no others, that he had stopped. He lied, but I believed him. Not because I trusted him, but because it was easier to do so, to not have to confront it all. I should have done what you’ve done and find it all out for myself, but I was too much of a coward. What you’re doing is so brave, Ma, and I’m real proud of you.”

  “But I hit you, sweetie. You told me the truth, a truth I should have already seen for myself. Maybe I did see it. And for that, I struck my little girl.”

  “But you did believe me. Otherwise you would have never gone looking for evidence.”

  “I needed to know, once and for all.”

  “And now you do, you’re going to call Agnes, pack your things and bring him down.”

  “But they’ll destroy him.”

  “There you go again, Ma—feeling sorry for him.”

  “I love him,” June said faintly, as if to herself.

  “Then if you love him, you’ll send him on the road to redemption. And at the same time, you’ll be helping in what little way you can all those poor girls whose image of abuse he has stored away for his own enjoyment.”

  “But they’ll destroy him,” June repeated, as though she hadn’t already said it.

  “Ma! He destroyed himself long ago. This is justice catching up with him. Now,” and she added this last bit with such solemnity in her voice, “you do as I say and call Agnes and prepare to take it all to the police.”

  There followed a short pause, the sound of her mother’s sobbing tugging at the strings of Claire’s heart.

  “Okay,” June pronounced after a while. “I’ll do it straight away.”

  “I love you, Ma,” Claire stated with such burning sincerity that she had never meant it more than she did in that moment.

  “I love you too, sweetie,” her mother let out, breaking back into heavy sobbing.

  After that, Claire got off the phone and immediately called Sam.

  “Claire,” he said as he answered. “What’s up?”

  “My mother has just discovered images of child abuse that my father has been keeping.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “I’ve told her to take them to the police and go stay with a friend. After that I want to go and get her the moment you return and bring her out here. I don’t trust my father. I never told anyone this before, but years ago I confronted him about his abuse of me. He looked me straight in the eyes and warned me that if I ever told anyone he’d harm me, my ma and my brother. It could have been an idle threat that day in his study, or it could have been the God’s honest truth.”

  “Okay don’t worry. Where’s your father now?”

  “He’s away. He won’t be home until this morning. I told my ma to go straight to the police.”

  “Very wise. I’ll be back at the Cliff Top by nine and we’ll go get her straight away. They probably won’t have even arrested him by then, so he won't be any the wiser. Where is your mom gonna be—with this friend?”

  “Her friend, Agnes, lives in a town called Ridge Wood on the outskirts of Colorado Springs.”

  “I know where that is. It shouldn’t take us any longer than a few hours to reach her. We could take the chopper, but it would make a scene, and we want to do this as discreetly as possible.”

  Claire’s mind was instantly cast back to yesterday’s news program.

  “Have you been watching the television?” she inquired of him.

  “No, but I’ve been informed that the media are hungry at the moment. But they can wait. Jenna’s not saying anything and that doesn’t automatically mean that I have to. Let them guess as much as they want. I’ve instructed my PR team to simply wave them away with ‘no statement’.”

  “But did you see the footage on the beach?”

  “I did. But once again it’s nothing to them except hearsay. I had my team deny it. You can’t see that it’s definitely me, and you have your back to the camera the whole time. It’s nothing.”

  “I hope so.

  She then paused a moment, before adding, “Do you have anything else on…David?”

  “Not yet. My guy’s are gonna stay out here. I have every local police department in a four-hundred-mile radius on red alert. It cost me a small fortune to pay them off, but if the family show up, they’ll get them.”

  “They won’t be rough?”

  “No, I’ve told them that the family is to be treated like they were the guests of Mexico. I’ve promised them another small fortune when the family are returned to me completely safe. My head of security is staying out there and he’ll grab the family and bring them back to the Cliff Top. He doesn’t see it being any longer than a few days at maximum.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In my plane. We arrive in Denver in three hours.”

  “Sam, this will all turn out okay, won’t it?”

  “You mean with your father or with David?”

  “Both.”

  “I think it will. Your father is finally getting his comeuppance, and we will work everything out for David. You just have to have faith, Claire.”

  “I love you so much, Sam Burgess.”

  “I love you too, Claire Prior.”

  Claire smiled and felt herself infinitely lucky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The explanation as to how Jules escaped Sam and his team is pretty simple. He had waited for the third turn off on the freeway, when incidentally Sam had only been a couple of hundred meters behind him, and thereafter followed the local roads, turning off once or twice with no other aim in mind except escape. He had then waited until they made it into a pretty inconspicuous little town and parked the car up out of sight, before checking into an abandoned-looking little hostel, booking out a whole dorm for the family and spending the night in bunk beds. First thing that morning, they had awoken and gotten straight back on the freeway before continuing south once again.

  Jules was now finishing up in a rather filthy bathroom that belonged to a service station they’d stopped at. When he’d finished washing his hands, Jules ventured outside, and his heart leapt in his chest. He saw David all on his own and looking around with terrified eyes, Juliette nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s your mother?” Jules asked the moment he’d run up to the forlorn boy.

  “I don’t know, Pa. She went off. She said that she saw her momma and Margot and Rosa and all the dead people she knew. She said they were calling to her. She kept calling me Danny and she wanted me to go along too, so we could all be together. She kept telling me that her mother never got to meet me. But I kept telling her that you wouldn’t want us wandering off and I tried to pull her back, but she wouldn’t give in and now she’s gone.”

  “Which way did she go?” Jules asked the boy, as a group of listless locals began wandering up to them.

  David pointed into a large flat field of fruit trees, rows and rows of them, workers moving in and out. Jules
immediately gave David the keys to the car and told him to lock himself in and not talk to anyone. The boy nodded and went off to the car. Jules, meanwhile, ran off into the fruit grove, the trees full of avocados, and followed the direction the boy had pointed in.

  Since the day before, Juliette had been getting worse and worse. Her medication had run out and she was now almost unable to remember things from one moment to the next, the past and the present merging as one like several rivers meeting in a delta of confusion. That night at the hostel, Jules hadn’t slept a wink as he’d had to guide her back to bed on five separate occasions, Juliette waking up, getting confused and attempting to leave the room. Each time he’d ushered her back to bed, she’d appeared deeply bewildered as to where she was going and kept mentioning something about thinking that she’d left the front door open, or that she had to meet someone. But when he’d ask who that was, she’d clam up and be unable to tell him.

  It was after he’d walked along a row of avocado trees that he came across one of the workers and asked him in poor Spanish whether he’d seen an elderly woman wandering this way.

  “Ce, señor,” the man had replied, before pointing straight ahead.

  After another five minutes of walking at a rapid pace, Jules came across the sight of Juliette standing just ahead. His rapid pace grew into a steady jog, and when he reached her he placed his hands on her shoulders. The instant he did, she jumped and glanced sharply at him. For a moment her dull eyes studied him with confusion, but eventually they softened as she recalled his face. When she did, she smiled and stroked his cheek with her soft hand, before returning her gaze to a spot just ahead of her.

  “They were all out here,” she said as she looked.

  “Who were out here?”

  “Papa was here, even though I’ve never seen him before. But I knew it was him. He was in his camp uniform and smiling at me. Others were here too. Lots of them. Momma, Rosa, Margot, Claude, all of them. Even the farmer, Robert Barrymore, was out here. All standing in this grove and waving at me. They were calling me to them. I wanted Danny to come and meet his grandma, but he wouldn’t. Stubborn boy.”