Tears gathered in Amira’s eyes then overflowed down her cheeks—happy tears this time—and the ache in her heart began to ease a little. She might not have foreseen this solution to the foundation’s financial woes, but she sure as heck wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Come on, everyone,” she finally managed to say through her tears. “We have work to do!”
As everyone cheered then returned to their desks, Caroline threw her arms around Amira in a massive hug.
“You did it. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you would,” she whispered. “I’m so proud of you and of what we’re doing here.”
“Me too,” Amira answered, lost in the comfort of her assistant’s embrace. “Me too.”
Amira settled at her desk and started to sort through the unopened mail that awaited her arrival. One in particular caught her eye. Marked “personal and confidential,” it bore the logo of one of the inner-city law firms. Curious, she plucked it open and slid out the single sheet of paper inside. She scanned the words, first telling her about the anonymous donor and his generosity. Her eyes flicked back to the date of the letter. It was from before her time in the hospital. No wonder the sum in the bank had come as such a surprise to her staff. None of them would have opened her personal mail.
The small smile on her face froze as she continued to read the letter and read the next sentence. This donation is being made under the condition that Amira Forsythe withdraw and step down from her association with the Fulfillment Foundation effective from the date of deposit of funds. There were other sentences, but the words all ran together before her eyes.
Ice ran through her veins. Step down? Immediately? She didn’t think anything could hurt her any more than she was hurt already, but this, the foundation, was all she had left. But the letter was clear. If she stayed, all financial assistance would be rescinded; if she left, the foundation would be assured of a regular influx of funds to ensure it continued its mission in the community.
Amira pushed her chair out from her desk and stood on shaking legs. All she had to do was countersign the bottom of the letter and fax it back to the firm in acceptance. Her hand dragged a pen across the page, and she went through the motions to ensure the fax went through.
She managed to get through the rest of the day encased in a state of numbness. Not even Casey’s excited voice when informed of the details of her family’s dream-come-true trip penetrated the frozen shell. By the end of the day, she was the last to leave the office. She put the letter she’d faxed to the anonymous donor’s lawyers on Caroline’s desk. Tomorrow would be soon enough for them all to know.
For the last time she wandered through the office, turned off the lights and locked the front door, pushing her key through the slot to fall silently to the carpet mat inside the door.
By the time she arrived back home, Amira couldn’t care less that she bore little resemblance to the perfectly coiffed fashion plate who had left in the morning. Her hair was more out than in its twist, her lipstick had long ago worn off on the rims of countless cups of tea and her mascara lay in smudges under her eyes. Nothing mattered anymore.
She dragged her feet up the few steps to her private entrance and inserted her key in the front door. As she turned her key in the lock, it occurred to her that she was completely and truly alone. Alone and bankrupt. For the briefest time today she’d realized that her annuity wouldn’t be needed to fund the foundation, but there was still the loan she had to repay.
Her annuity would barely touch the surface of the sum she had to repay, and all hope she’d nurtured of a future, died. Whatever money she had and whatever money she could potentially earn would be tied up for a very long time.
But at least the foundation would go on. She had to hold on to that dream. So what if it wouldn’t be her dream anymore—she’d made it happen. She’d brought it to life.
Inside the house she forced herself into the shower in an attempt to warm her body. Afterward she changed into a fleece sweatshirt and track pants and sat down with yet another mug of tea, a notepad and pen. It was time to start seriously planning how she was going to manage—survive was more to the point. But nothing would come, and her paper remained blank. Eventually Amira picked up her mug and went through to the main house.
The furnishings shrouded in dust cloths had never been more eerie. She’d tried to make a habit of walking through the house at least once every couple of weeks to check that everything remained secure, but it had been a whole lot longer than that since she’d done so.
Ignoring the bottom floor, Amira trailed up the staircase, stopping to toast her grandmother briefly on the way up.
“You win again, Grandmother. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are.”
She took a sip of her tea and wondered anew at what had driven Isobel to be so harsh toward her only granddaughter. Whatever it had been, Amira had no way of ever knowing. She carried on up to where her father’s portrait hung and sank to the floor, desperate for some sense of connection to the handsome smiling man whose eyes were so much like her own.
How different would things have been, she wondered, if he and her mother hadn’t died that day? She shook her head. She could no more change the past than she could satisfy Isobel’s posthumous demands.
She searched her memory for the sound of her father’s voice, the feel of his arms around her, but somewhere in the last eighteen years she’d lost all that. All that and so very much more. Yet, on the periphery of her mind lingered the sensation of being loved, of being happy. She wanted that again; oh how she wanted to feel like that again.
“Amira?”
She knocked over her mug on the carpet runner as she struggled to rise on feet that stung with pins and needles from the way she’d been sitting.
“Brent? What on earth—?”
She drank in the sight of him. Dressed in faded jeans and a heavy black woollen sweater, he was a feast for her eyes. But she had to remember his betrayal, his anger. Amira forced herself to clamp down on the surge of emotion rocketing through her.
“You didn’t answer your front door—it was unlocked so I let myself in. I was worried about you. You wouldn’t see me at the hospital. I had to see for myself that you were okay.”
She drew herself up to her full height and met his gaze, summoning every shred of Forsythe sangfroid at her fingertips.
“Well, you needn’t have worried. As you can see, I’m fine.” Please leave now, before I break down again.
“I…I wanted to say I was wrong and,” he said and sighed deeply, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? The word tore the breath from her throat, making it impossible to speak. He shifted under her incredulous stare, as if for once in his life he wasn’t the strong and confident man she knew him to be. As she watched him, he made as if to speak again, then shook his head slightly and turned to go back down the stairs.
“Wait!” she cried out, anger blooming in her chest where before only pain had resided.
Brent stopped on the stairs.
“You can’t just say you’re sorry and then leave. So you’re sorry. So what? Why? You made it perfectly clear what you thought of me. You even planned to set me up for failure. Is that what you’re sorry about? Because if that’s all it is, you can take your apology and you can sho—!”
Brent ascended the stairs lightning fast and reached out to grab her shoulders, giving her a little shake before pulling her now shaking body against the hardness of his.
“I know. I was a bastard. A total and utter bastard. I can’t ever ask or even expect you to forgive me for that. It was inexcusable what I did—what I planned to do. But, Amira, I’m begging you, please give me—give us—another chance.”
She pushed away from his hold. “Why should I? How can I trust you again? How do I know you don’t have another strike against me up your sleeve?”
“I need you to trust me, like I should have trusted you. Please, can we talk about this downstairs?”
Amira g
ave a short nod and bent to pick up her mug before leading him back down the stairs and through to her apartment. She dropped into a chair and gave him a baleful stare. She still couldn’t believe he was here. While her heart leapt in her chest, her mind still warned her to tread carefully.
“Go on then,” she said flatly. “Talk.”
Brent lowered himself onto the couch, his body dominating the piece of furniture.
“There’s a lot I need to say to you, but before I start can you tell me why you broke off the wedding?”
“The wedding?” She looked startled. “You know why. Because of the proviso in Grandmother’s will. I didn’t know about it until it was too late—not that it mattered anyway.”
“No. Not this wedding. The first one.”
“What difference does it make? You weren’t interested back then. Why now?”
“I came here straight from the church. Did you know that?”
Amira’s expression told Brent she had no idea, confirming his belief that Isobel had orchestrated the whole thing as effectively as a military maneuver, including training her staff to head him off at the pass.
“Why?” She wasn’t giving him an inch.
“To try and talk you back into going through with the wedding for one thing.”
“If you were so keen to talk me into going through with the wedding, why didn’t you try and contact me when we got back?”
“By then I was angry. At you, at Isobel. The whole damn world. When your housekeeper told me you and your grandmother had gone away, I wondered how long you’d been planning it. It all just seemed a little too slick for it to have been a spur of the moment thing. I was told you’d gone to the airport and that you wouldn’t be back for a month or more. I ended up pouring all my frustration into work. By the time you got back, I was so busy trying to hold my business together that I wasn’t prepared for anyone’s excuses. It was wrong of me. But all I could focus on was protecting my name and my future.” He rose and paced the carpet. “I’m not saying it was right. If anything it was probably a totally immature reaction. But that’s done now. I can’t turn back time, but I do concede I handled the whole situation very badly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the business?”
He stopped pacing and shoved his hands in his pockets. “At the time, I didn’t want to worry you. Looking back now, I probably was feeling too insecure to want you to know—to give you an excuse to back out. Your grandmother had made it clear often enough that she didn’t approve of me, that my financial position was no more than a drop in the bucket as far as she was concerned. I knew if she found out what was happening with my business before the wedding there was no way she’d let us go ahead. I didn’t want to take that risk.” He sat down in the chair opposite Amira, his forearms resting on his thighs as he leaned forward. “I didn’t want to lose you, Amira, but I couldn’t compete with her, could I?”
A flush stained Amira’s throat, and her lower lip trembled. Damn, he hadn’t meant to upset her again.
“She told me you’d deliberately withheld the information from me. From the moment I woke in the morning, she went on and on about it, waving the newspaper under my nose and telling me it wasn’t too late. I was dressed in my gown, ready for the photographer. We were still arguing over it when she suddenly started to complain of chest pains. Our doctor came straight away and insisted she go to the hospital, but she refused to go unless I promised not to go ahead with the wedding.
“I had no choice, Brent. I was terrified I would kill her if I married you. I was incredibly hurt that you hadn’t told me about what you were going through. I thought that if you kept that from me then what else were you hiding from me? That maybe Grandmother was right all along—that you only wanted to marry me because of my family’s fortune and position in society. You were my first real boyfriend, my first love. We were about to be married. If I couldn’t trust you, who could I trust? So I sent that text.
“After we went to the hospital, her tests came back clear, and instead of coming home afterward, she’d arranged for our luggage to be brought to us and for a car to take us to the airport. She’d planned it all along. When I asked her about it, she told me she knew you’d let me down. Eventually I believed her.”
Brent groaned. By trying to protect her, he’d ended up destroying them both.
“I had my reasons, my insecurities,” he said quietly. “They were what drove me to succeed. I was too stupid to realize that I was driving you away at the same time.” He thought back to his upbringing, to that sense of being beholden to his uncle for providing his education and then doing his utmost to pay him back. Of wanting never to have to rely on anyone for help in any shape or form. “How could I tell you my deepest fears? I didn’t think you’d understand, coming as you did from a background of wealth.”
“But that’s what couples do. They support each other. Help one another. Stand together against their fears,” Amira argued.
“I had to be able to give you what you already had, and more. How do you think I felt when I realized I was losing everything I’d worked so hard for. I couldn’t lose you too.”
“Money isn’t everything. We would have managed.”
“You say that when you’ve never wanted for anything. When you’ve never had to check a price tag or consider the cost of what you’re wearing, what you drive, how you eat.” Brent got up and paced again. “I felt I had to compete with all that, and when the papers blasted my news all over their pages that morning, I held on to the hope that you loved me enough to marry me anyway. I needed you more then than I’d ever needed you. And that’s why I took the chance to have my revenge, to pay you back for choosing money over me.”
Amira paled, her hands clenched into fists in her lap. Brent leaned forward and grasped her hands, slowly unpeeling her tightly knotted fingers and threading them through his own.
“Believe me. I am deeply sorry for what I put you through. Back then and now. I should have known Isobel wouldn’t have given you a choice.”
“I should have stood up to her,” Amira whispered.
“How could you when she’d been manipulating you for so many years? She’s gone now. She has no hold over you any longer.”
Amira laughed—a raw sound that struck straight to his heart. “No hold over me? You know exactly what kind of hold she has over me. You’ve read her will. Even in death she’s still trying to force me into motherhood or marriage, but not with the man I love. I honestly admit I used you to have a baby, but it was because I couldn’t bear to think about marrying anyone else.”
Brent latched on to the words he’d been hoping against hope to hear. The man I love.
“So if you couldn’t marry anyone else, Amira, would you still marry me?”
“Don’t!” She pulled her hands from his grasp and covered her face, her shoulders shaking as a sob racked her body.
“You said Isobel was trying to force you into marriage to someone you don’t love. But if you could, would you marry me?” he pressed, determined to hear her answer.
“Yes.”
He barely heard her through her tears. His heart twisted because he was once again causing her so much grief; but her answer sent a positive punch of hope through his body. She loved him. The knowledge suddenly made him feel ten feet tall and invincible. This was what he’d missed in his life. This was what had made that weekend at Windsong so special in those moments when he’d forgotten his vendetta against her.
And he knew without doubt he loved her too. Now all he had to do was convince her of it.
“Amira, look at me.”
He reached out and took her hands, tearing them off her tear-streaked face.
“We can’t let her win. Not now. Not when we still have the rest of our lives to be together. I love you too much to let you go again.” He felt her stiffen at his words. Undeterred, he pressed on. “I was so wrapped up in paying you back for what had happened eight years ago that when I figured out you must be pregnan
t I had to see you. Had to see for myself that you’d hidden our baby from me. On top of everything else, it was the ultimate betrayal. I’ll freely admit all I wanted to do at that stage was rip everything from your grasp.
“I already knew about the Fulfillment Foundation, and I’d set plans in motion to see you removed from the administration.”
At Amira’s shocked gasp he squeezed her hands firmly in his, drawing them to his lips and pressing a kiss to each.
“That was you? You took that from me too?” She wrenched free of his hold and rose on shaking legs.
He tried to stop her but she moved out of his reach, looking at him with eyes full of pain and accusation.
“I was a man bent on revenge. I had no thought for what it would do to you aside from take from you something personally important. To make sure you knew loss on every level the way I’d known it when you left me. In the past few years, whenever I’ve seen you featured in the papers or on TV, you’ve always been a figurehead, and I thought that was as deep as you went. Taking the foundation from you would have been nothing, especially when I saw the financial difficulty it was in. I arranged to make a sizable donation. But the donation was on the condition of you stepping down from your position there.”
“How could you do that to me? It was all I had left.” She turned her back on him. “Get out. Please just get out, and leave me alone.”
“No! I’ve learned what a total idiot I was. I’ve seen that you’re more than just a face on these charities you work for. They’re a part of you as much as you’re a part of them and their success. I couldn’t take that from you now. I’m ashamed I ever dreamed I’d do that in the first place.”
He stood up, staring at her back, his arms helpless at his side. He wanted nothing more right now than to drag her into his arms and try and comfort her for the hell he’d put her through—to make up for the pain he’d caused. But he had so much more to say to her first. To convince her they belonged together.
Convenient Marriage, Inconvenient Husband Page 13