Hawke's Game

by Natasha West

  I realised that for Jessica, her pleasure hadn’t been the point. She’d just wanted to feel needed. And I’d certainly needed her. For a few magnificent moments, she let me forget the day that preceded them.

  Realising that, my brain, cruel traitor that it was, suddenly pushed the thing I’d been hiding from right to the front of my thoughts. Penny. What had just taken place had been a divine distraction, but here she was again, taking up space inside me, making me feel like I’d lost something that couldn’t be replaced. Not with sex, not with revenge, not with anything.

  Anger bubbled up inside me. No, I told imaginary Penny, you won’t win this. You don’t want me and I’m going to find a way not to want you.

  ‘I hate to break the moment, but what about your wife?’

  She jerked round to face me.

  ‘Alex? What about her?’

  ‘Are you going to tell her about this? I’m not really up to dealing with your pissed off wife coming to murder me.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to matter in the long run.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Her face was lost in thoughts I couldn’t read for a moment. But then, I began to see that I was watching her realising something extraordinary.

  ‘I think my marriage is over.’

  I was having a terrible sense of déjà vu. Was this going to be like Alex all over again?

  ‘Really?’

  She looked over at me and gave me a sweet reassuring smile.

  ‘It’s OK, Beth. This isn’t about you. Things have been bad for a while. I don’t think…’

  She paused as though letting what she was saying sink in for herself.

  ‘I don’t think we’re in love anymore. I don’t think we have been for a long time.’

  She turned to me.

  ‘I think it took this to let me admit that to myself. I needed to accept that I don’t want to be here anymore. And I don’t have to be. I can leave. I can be happy again.’

  My face must still have looked a little worried at that point because she grabbed my hand.

  ‘Beth, relax. I know you’re married too and I’m not making any assumptions about your marriage. I don’t expect anything from you. This was what it was. It was just a beautiful moment. That’s all I want it to be.’

  I was happy for Jessica, she was a sweet girl and she really deserved to be happy. But I didn’t want to take credit for her epiphany. I wasn’t some knight in shining armour, coming to carry her off from the evil sorceress. I’d been in this for myself at the end of the day. She’d gotten something out of it too, and I was pleased for her. But I wanted one more thing from Jessica, if she could give it to me.

  And the groundwork had been laid. I’d put myself here, in Jessica’s bed. I’d created an intimacy between us. I’d found cracks in the marriage, more than I could have dreamed off. There wasn’t going to be a better time to get some dirt on Alex.

  ‘So, what now?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you ask for a divorce?’

  ‘At some point, I guess.’

  ‘How do you think she’ll take that?’ I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be. Jessica’s eyes grew large at the thought.

  ‘Not great. Alex doesn’t like to lose. Even if she doesn’t especially want the prize.’

  ‘You think she’ll fight you, try to keep you?’

  ‘I don’t care. She can say what she wants. I’m going, no matter what it costs.’

  ‘But you’re entitled to half.’

  ‘I don’t want anything. I just want my life back.’

  ‘Jessica, that’s a very decent way to look at it, but let’s be honest. You’re going to walk out of here with nothing. No money and no job. And that’s going to be tough.’

  She began to look a bit concerned.

  ‘You need to protect yourself, make sure you leave here with something. Make sure you’re at least set up to start again on your own.’

  She sighed deeply, struggling with that idea.

  ‘Maybe I do have some entitlements, legally. But I don’t know, is it really right to take what I didn’t earn?’

  ‘You think you didn’t work for all this? You did. You were here for her, you made a home for her and you helped raise her child. You created half of this life. That’s not nothing. I had a friend who went through this exact thing, and she thought about it like you did. Now she’s sleeping on her sister’s sofa.’

  That was a lie. But as far as I was concerned, it was still sound advice for anyone looking to divorce a richer partner. At any rate, it was only a pit stop on the way to what I really wanted to ask.

  ‘If I were you, I’d get my ducks in a row before she has time to even call a lawyer.’

  ‘I guess I do have a few days before she gets home, to start proceedings.’

  ‘You should use that time to think about anything that she really doesn’t want to lose, anything that could be leverage.’

  She thought about that for a second.

  ‘The Murphy name, that’s her Achilles heel, if anything. Her reputation is everything to her.’

  That was what I’d hoped she’d say.

  ‘Do you have anything that could damage that? Something that she’d hate to get out?’

  She thought for a second.

  ‘Alex isn’t like that. She never crosses any lines that matter. She likes to think she’s beyond reproach.’

  Bitterness clouded her features.

  ‘No, Alex’s crimes aren’t the kind that leave a mark. They’re less easily detectable than that.’

  Well, great. Well done, Alex. Your wife only knows you as an emotionally abusive spouse. She doesn’t know how you do business.

  But the way she’d tried to crush me, I knew she didn’t play fair. There had to be something beyond the minor crime she’d perpetrated on me, something truly wicked in her past to expose her as the villain she was. But Jessica, relative innocent that she was, obviously had nothing that I could use.

  She leaned back on the pillow, finding peace.

  ‘I think I’d like to do this clean, anyway. If I lose, I lose, but she won’t take my pride. I’m not playing dirty.’

  Good for you, I thought begrudgingly. Some of us don’t have that option. For some of us, dirty is all we have.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I was back to the drawing board. Nothing was different than it had been a few days ago. I still hadn’t managed to ruin Alex’s career the way she had mine. I’d slept with her wife, and I guess that could be considered pretty good revenge, but it wasn’t satisfying, because ultimately it didn’t change anything for her. Yes, she was about to go through a divorce, and I’d played my part in that. But it wasn’t enough. Because although I’d expedited the crumble of her marriage, it would have happened eventually, with or without me. I needed more than that. I needed to break her.

  Had I been this angry when it first happened? I’d been furious, certainly, but it was worse now. Because it seemed that everything that had happened since was part of one maelstrom, with Alex at the eye of it. If I hadn’t lost the book deal, I wouldn’t have lost Lauren, and I may never have had the realisation of my enduring love for Penny.

  Thinking about the woman I’d been: moving forward with my life, satisfied enough with it, it felt as though Alex had taken much more than a book contract, more than a career, more than a relationship, more than love. It was a life she’d stolen. And that was a debt I wanted to repay. Now more than ever.

  And there was one more card I had to play.

  The group in lane seven of the upscale bowling alley were loud and drunk. They were a crowd of flashy trust fund kids, with too much time and too few brains. It hadn’t been hard to find them, social networking being the detailed diary it was to kids this age, with this much money. But one of them stood out. She was sitting a little apart from her friends, sipping from a hip flask, alone in the crowd.

  I walked over
to where she sat. She didn’t look up as I approached, she seemed lost in her own little abyss. The resemblance to her mother was astounding.

  ‘Georgia?’

  ‘What?’ she said belligerently before she looked up and saw me. She looked taken aback, is if she’d been expecting it to be one of her cronies.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  I smiled at her, turning on the charm. I wasn’t Beth tonight. I was very much Julia.

  ‘I’m Julia Hawke. I’m an old friend of your mother’s. Can we have a little chat?’

  We were sat in the bar next door to the bowling alley. It was an expensive place, in the hippest part of town, made for people like Georgia to waste their money in.

  Georgia was looking around impatiently.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what this is about, but if it’s anything to do with her, I’m not interested.’

  Just as I’d thought. There was a lot of anger there. I could exploit that.

  ‘Georgia, give me ten minutes to explain what I want. If you’re not interested, I’ll leave you in peace. But I think you are going to be interested, if you want what I want. And what I want is to take Alex down.’

  She perked up at that last statement. I had her attention.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your mother blocked my book release because of a sixteen year old grudge. But if I can get some dirt on her, I can repay the favour. She’s being announced as CEO of Murphy House in a few weeks. I presume you know that?’

  Georgia rolled her eyes.

  ‘Of course I know. It’s all she talks about. But what do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘You’ve lived with your mother all this time. You’ve been a child in her house. And if I know one thing about kids, it’s that they’re sneaky. They go through belongings, read mail, and overhear phone calls.’

  She smirked a little. I was right about that at least.

  ‘Somewhere in the last twenty years, you’ve picked up some of you mother’s dirt. All you have to do is give me something nice and juicy. I’ll leak it, make sure it goes viral. A scandal will put a serious spanner in the works of that promotion.’

  She leaned back in her chair, considering the offer, considering me.

  ‘I don’t know you. You think you can just walk up to me and ask me for something like this? What makes you think I would do something like that to my own mother?’

  ‘Because you hate her. Probably even more than I do.’

  It was a big gambit. I hoped I’d read the situation correctly. Because if I hadn’t, I was done. Georgia would tell her mother what I was up to, and someone with her resources could still make my life worse, in all sorts of ways.

  But Georgia’s lip curled up at the edge, conceding. I was dead on.

  ‘Maybe. But you’re still a stranger, there needs to be real trust between two people if they’re going to do what you’re suggesting. I mean, there could be serious blowback for me here. I hate that bitch, but she does fund my life. If she found out, she’d cut me off in a heartbeat.’

  ‘OK, I guess that’s fair. How do you propose we develop this trust?’

  She smirked to herself.

  ‘Well, for starters, what’s this all about? Why does she want to ruin you? I’m going to need the details on that before I can begin to understand what you’re about.’

  I’d been afraid of this. But she had a point, she needed to know what she was getting in the middle of. I was going to have to put all my cards on the table.

  ‘Sixteen years ago, I had an affair with your mother. She left her husband, your dad, for me. But I didn’t want be tied down. In fact, I didn’t want to be a step parent to you, in all honesty. I was not much older than you are now and it just wasn’t what I wanted.’

  Her eyes flashed in anger.

  ‘That was you?’

  I nodded, looking her directly in the eye. She deserved that much.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘She kicked my dad out. My aunt Brenda told me all about it. The whole family had a meltdown.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was four. Do you get that? Four!’

  ‘I know. But in my defense, I never asked her to leave him. I never wanted her to do that. It was just supposed to be a fling. It’s not much of an excuse, I realise. But there it is.’

  She looked perplexed at that.

  ‘That’s not how Brenda tells it. My mum told her that you’d planned to be together but then you bottled out.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t know if Alex really believed that or if she just said it to save face, but that’s not what happened.’

  She looked away for a second, and I could see the wheels of her mind turn as she tried to incorporate this new perspective on her old understanding of her family history.

  ‘Didn’t Alex ever talk to you about this directly?’

  ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? Her? Intentionally show me a chink in the Alex Murphy armour?’

  ‘So you never discussed it?’

  ‘She just said ‘it didn’t work out’. Dad said the same thing. They’re both locked up tighter than a duck’s arse.’

  The roots of Georgia’s anger were becoming clearer. It wasn’t just the young step-parent, or a strict upbringing. These were people that didn’t talk about their emotions. Alex had been like that with me. We’d slept together for months without her so much as hinting to me how she felt. Georgia had been brought up in an atmosphere of keeping emotions under firm lock and key. And it wasn’t for her. And thank god it wasn’t. Because I needed her to start talking.

  ‘Georgia-’

  ‘So you really slept with my mum?’ she said, and there was something in her tone I couldn’t quite recognise.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘Come on, take a guess.’

  I sighed, trying to estimate a number. Where was she going with this?

  ‘I’m not sure, a few dozen times I guess.’

  ‘And she must have really loved you to break up her marriage.’

  ‘I suppose she did.’

  I suddenly felt something underneath the table. Georgia’s foot was making the slightest contact with my own.

  ‘But you didn’t want her. She couldn’t have you. Not the way she wanted.’

  She was beginning to rub her foot against mine. A sexy grin crept onto her face.

  ‘Well, then. I think we can probably make some sort of agreement here. Quid pro quo, isn’t that what they say?’

  Oh dear, I thought. This was not going quite to plan.

  ‘Georgia…’ I began admonishingly.

  ‘Come on, Julia. You’re hot. I’m hot. Wouldn’t it just sweeten the deal?’

  I confess, it held an appeal. She was a beautiful young woman. And she had the keys to my revenge. It would have been easy and pleasurable to give her what she was asking for.

  But when I thought about her motivations for it, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t about me, she just wanted to feel like she’d gotten one up on her mother. I was a trophy to her. I didn’t mind so much about that for my own sake. But it felt like a very bad thing to humour in Georgia. Something about it was uncomfortable.

  But did that really matter? Did I care why she wanted what she wanted, when it so closely matched my own needs?

  ‘Georgia.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t think we should do that.’

  Her foot stopped rubbing against me and she glared at me insolently.

  ‘Spoil sport.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Whatever. I’m gonna help you anyway. I think I have some stuff that will do the trick.’

  Chapter Twenty

  I awoke to a thumping on my bedroom door.

  ‘Stone? You up?’

  I climbed delicately out of bed and staggered to the door. I opened it to see Lucas holding a cup of tea out to me.
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  ‘Is that for me?’

  He placed it in my hand. I took a sip, the hot liquid felt good running down my throat.

  ‘Right. You’ve taken the tea. That puts you in a binding contract to exchange the goods for information.’

  I groaned tiredly. I wasn’t really up to it.

  ‘Lucas, can we maybe do it a bit later? I’m still half asleep.’

  He tried to look past me.

  ‘She’s not in there, is she?’

  ‘No! I’m just, I don’t know, feeling a bit delicate.’

  ‘Look, I wing-manned the bejesus out of you last night. I deserve to know how it shook out. I left you looking pretty chummy with that girl. Did she deliver?’

  I could see he wasn’t going to leave till I gave him the low down. I stood back to allow him entry. He walked in and sat on my messy bed, already on tenterhooks.

  ‘So?’

  I sat down next to him.

  ‘Yeah. I guess she delivered.’

  He snapped his fingers in triumph. Then he looked at my face and his expression dropped.

  ‘You don’t look very happy about it.’

  ‘I am. It was fun.’

  And it had been. Sienna had been quite the exciting bathroom partner. After we’d finished pleasuring each other, she’d given me a peck on the cheek and told me that if I ever wanted to do it again, I knew where to find her. And off she strutted, out into the night, no doubt on the way to her next sexual engagement.

  ‘So why does your face look like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  He didn’t reply for a moment.

  ‘It didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Luc.’

  ‘You can’t bang your way out of heartbreak, Stone. I’ve tried enough times to know.’

  His words surprised me and something horrible, something I didn’t understand, jerked inside me. I felt a tear well. I blinked it desperately away. But it was too late. He’d seen it. He put his arms out, trying to hug me.

  ‘Come here.’

  I struggled away from the hug.

  ‘No, stop it. I’m fine.’

  ‘Penny…’

  He never called me Penny. It was the worst possible thing I could have heard at that moment. It made me feel vulnerable, naked.