A Very Private Merger

by Day Leclaire

  She pushed the worry aside and embraced the moment, her pain and fear lending a desperate urgency to her lovemaking. He must have picked up on it on some level because he caught fire, driving them higher, further, every stroke and caress burning with an incandescence they’d never experienced before. She literally felt as though he’d filled her with such brilliant passion she couldn’t contain it all without bursting into flames. Recklessly, she threw herself into the fire and allowed it to consume her, all of her, building the pyre as high as it would go. And then she built it higher still.

  It couldn’t last. Together they hit the peak, teetered for the briefest of moments, before their climaxes ripped through them, a shattering so intense Nikki couldn’t remember where she was or when…though the “who” in the equation remained crystal clear. Jack shuddered in her arms and collapsed on top of her.

  “Fifty more years,” he insisted.

  She shook her head in confusion. “What?”

  “I want fifty more years of that. Maybe sixty.”

  She laughed, even though her heart was breaking. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Hot tub, shower or food? Since we have sixty more years, I can be generous and let you choose.”

  “Food. I’m starved. I can whip something together. Pancakes? Omelets? Grits?”

  “Yes.”

  Nikki grinned. “Coming right up.”

  They ate out on the deck in their bathrobes, enjoying the warm breeze flowing off the ocean. She deliberately kept the conversation light and casual. They’d had so many dark issues to deal with the day before, she just wanted to kick back and relax. To pretend that their future held endless Sunday mornings like this one. Even as she wallowed in the pleasure of it she knew it wouldn’t last.

  And it didn’t.

  Jack took a long swallow of coffee, eyeing her through the steam rising from his drink. “Truth time, Nikki,” he announced.

  She paused with her cup halfway to her mouth. Carefully, she returned it to the saucer. Her heart rate kicked up. Did he know? Did he suspect? “What truth, Jack?”

  “You didn’t wear your engagement ring to Matt and Susannah’s wedding yesterday. Why? Were you ashamed to admit to all your society friends that you’d agreed to marry me? Ashamed to admit it to the Kincaids?”

  She immediately leaned forward and caught his hand in hers. “No!” she told him, filling that single word with absolute conviction. “That’s not it at all. I’ve never cared about those things. It’s not how I was raised.”

  “It would be understandable considering your mother’s a Beaulyn,” Jack suggested. “The crème de la crème of Charleston high society.”

  “Granted, my mother could have had her pick of any of the men within that sphere. But she loved my father—a cop—and that’s who she married.” More than anything Nikki wanted to reassure him on that point and a hint of urgency rippled through her response. “Do you really think she would have raised me to think any differently?”

  “Then why didn’t you wear my ring yesterday?”

  She closed her eyes. The time had come. Selfishly, she thought she’d have a handful of days before admitting the truth. Now they slipped through her fingers like grains of windblown sand. Slowly, she released his hand. “Because I didn’t want to agree to an engagement that’s going to end almost as soon as it begins.”

  Jack shoved back his chair and stood, towering over her. “What the hell does that mean? What’s going on, Nikki?”

  She forced herself to give it to him straight. “I know who owns the final ten percent of TKG stock.”

  His eyes narrowed, anger flashing through the crystalline blue. “And you’ve already given the information to RJ?”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t know.”

  That gave Jack pause. “Then why would you think I’d end our engagement over the missing shareholder, unless…” He stilled and she caught understanding dawning in his gaze. “Son of a bitch. It’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she confessed. “I own the shares.”

  “All this time we’ve been involved—intimately involved—and you’ve kept this from me?”

  She flinched at the outrage underscoring his question. “I think you can guess why.”

  “Oh, no guessing involved, sweetheart.” Somehow he’d managed to turn the word “sweetheart” into a curse. “There can only be one reason. You don’t trust me.”

  “It isn’t a matter of trust,” she instantly denied.

  He cut her off with a sweep of his hand. “Bull! We met nearly five months ago. You had all the time in the world to tell me you were the shareholder in control of the final ten percent of TKG stock. I guarantee you would have been up-front about your ownership if you trusted me.”

  “It wasn’t you I didn’t trust, Jack.” Time for utter honesty, no matter how miserable it made her. “It was what you would do with the information I couldn’t trust.”

  He didn’t pull his punches. “You mean what I might pressure you to do with those shares.”

  “Something like that,” she admitted.

  He paced to the railing, his long, impatient strides eating up the deck. “Let’s start over.” He turned and faced her. “How did you come into possession of the shares?”

  “My grandfather, Todd Beaulyn, encouraged your father to expand into real estate. Reginald needed to borrow money in order to do so.”

  He thought it through. “I assume your grandfather provided the funds in exchange for ten percent stock in TKG?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you then inherited the shares from Beaulyn, along with your Rainbow Row house?”

  She nodded. “I was his only grandchild, and my mother wasn’t interested in the house or the shares.”

  “That’s quite an inheritance.”

  She kept her gaze steady on his. “It’s also the other reason Reginald hired me when my career went south. Your father wanted me to understand the inner workings of TKG so I’d be able to make intelligent decisions about how to vote my shares when the time came. Of course, since he owned ninety percent to my ten percent, there wasn’t much voting involved while he was alive.”

  “How is it possible that RJ doesn’t know you own them?”

  “Reginald didn’t tell anyone he’d sold off a portion of the company in order to expand into the real estate market,” she explained. “As part of the contract, my grandfather agreed to keep the sale confidential and buried ownership beneath several levels of holding companies. Granddad was a clever man. You’d have to know where to look to find it.”

  “No doubt Dad didn’t want any flack from the family.”

  She shrugged. “Could be. When I inherited the shares, Reginald asked if I would also maintain the same confidentiality as my grandfather. I agreed.”

  “Of course, he had you over a barrel,” Jack pointed out. “It’s not like you would have refused considering he’d just saved your professional reputation by offering you a job.”

  “I would have remained silent, regardless,” she insisted.

  Jack leaned back against the railing and folded his arms across his chest, his eyes winter-cold. “Let’s see if I have this straight. You worked for The Kincaid Group the entire time we’ve been together—without bothering to mention that fact to me. You’ve also owned the outstanding ten percent shares, also without bothering to mention it, and even knowing it was information I required in time for the board meeting. In other words, our entire relationship is founded on lies.”

  Exhaustion swept over her. “I didn’t tell you about my connections to The Kincaid Group because I wanted to have a relationship with you. Once you found out the truth, our involvement would end. And you know why, Jack.” Pain filled her at the undeniable fact that who she was would always come second to what she owned. That he would always want her more for those shares than for love. “The stock will always come between us because I hold the solution to your goal of destroying the Kincaids.”

  �
�If our relationship ends it’s because you’ve kept secrets from a man you claim to love, not because of where you work or the stock you own.”

  Nikki shot to her feet. “I don’t claim to love you. I do love you. What possible benefit is there for me in our relationship other than love? You made it clear from the start that you despised the Kincaids, that you intended to take them down and, no doubt, me with them. If I’d told you about the stock shares what would you have done?”

  “Exactly what I intend to do now. Ask to buy your shares or have you give me your proxy, which is the same thing RJ will do.”

  “RJ wants them in order to preserve TKG. You want them so you can destroy the Kincaids,” she shot back.

  “I’ve already told you. I have no intention of destroying The Kincaid Group.”

  “Only the Kincaids.”

  She saw the split-second hesitation. The slightest crack in the fierce determination he’d shown up until now. She deliberately changed the subject in order to throw him off-kilter, hoping against hope she could get him to look at the situation from a fresh angle—one that might put an end to his ridiculous need for vengeance. “Why do you own this house, Jack? Why do you own the plantation in Greenville?”

  He shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “How many bedrooms do you have, combined between the two places? A dozen? Two dozen? Three?”

  “I never bothered to count.”

  “How many square feet?” She hammered him with the questions. “Ten thousand, twenty? More?”

  Jack shot a hand through his hair, his irritation palpable. “What’s your point, Nikki?”

  “You bought homes, Jack. Homes.” She stressed the word, hoping against hope he’d pick up on the significance. “Homes which are meant for large families. And yet, there’s just you. Well, and your mother and Alan,” she felt obligated to add.

  “They never lived with me.”

  She pounced on his statement. “Exactly. Your mother and Alan have—or rather, had—their own home. So, why didn’t you buy some sort of ritzy two bedroom apartment overlooking the harbor? Why a home, Jack?”

  “Stop using that word. They’re not homes. They’re houses. Investments.”

  She released her breath in a sigh. “I think some part of you knows differently. I think on an unconscious level you want to fill them with family, maybe because yours has always been so fractured. You could have that. You could have your family here.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “You’re lying.” She dared to step closer, urgency threading through her words and communicating itself in the tension of her body. “All these years you’ve believed you were on the outside, looking in. Instead, you’ve locked yourself away in homes crying out for a family and refused to open the door. Don’t you get it, Jack? You’re already inside. You just have to let others in here with you.”

  “Are you finished?” He’d closed down, ruthlessly cutting off access to any sort of emotional connection. “I’d like to settle our business issues.”

  “I’m not even close to finished. But since you want to discuss business, let’s do that. Are you really going to take over the company your father spent all these years building, just so you can extract some sort of petty revenge by tossing your brothers into the street? By finding ways to destroy your sisters? Will that satisfy you?” she demanded.

  “Yes!” The word escaped in a harsh whisper, ripped from the deepest part of him. “Yes, that would satisfy me.”

  “Because you’d win. Because then everyone would know that Reginald should have acknowledged you from the start because you’re the best of all his sons, of all his daughters. Better than Matthew. Better than RJ. Better than Laurel and Kara and Lily. And once you’ve proven that, then what, Jack? What will you be left with?”

  “The Kincaid Group.”

  “A shell. A shell without a heart and soul because you’d have carved the heart and soul out of it. A business is just a thing. Oh, don’t you get that?” A heartbreaking urgency filled her voice. “It’s the people who run it, who create it, who shape it…that’s what makes it great.”

  “You’re saying I can’t provide the heart and soul?”

  Didn’t he see? “I’m saying that if you cut your family out of the business, you’ll also cut part of yourself out, as well. You may not realize it at first because you’ll be too busy celebrating what you perceive as a win. But eventually you’ll discover how cold and sterile the business has become. How lonely and passionless. That it is just a business. That you’ve destroyed something that can’t be replaced.”

  “The heart and soul?” he asked dryly.

  She nodded. “At some point you’ll realize what you’ve managed to win doesn’t give you any satisfaction.”

  “I can live with that.”

  She stepped back. “But I can’t.”

  He followed the path of her retreat. “What will it take to convince you to sign your proxy over to me?”

  His question brought home how vast the chasm separating them was and made her want to cry. Instead, she lifted chin and faced him down. “Nothing. Nothing you can say will convince me to do that.”

  “So, you’re going to give RJ your proxy?”

  “It’s what Reginald wanted, what he once told me he intended. I owe it to your father to respect his wishes.”

  She saw it then. The deep, unfathomable pain of having his father—once again—put his legitimate son ahead of his bastard. “Jack, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “I think it does.”

  Desperation drove her to try anything she could to resolve the conflict between them. “I still have a wish from the bachelor auction. You owe it to me.”

  He simply shook his head. “That’s not going to work, Nikki.”

  But maybe it would. Maybe there was one final person who could sway Jack, who could convince him to change his course and choose a new path, one that led to new beginnings instead of revenge. It was a risk. A hideous risk. And one that forced her to break her word to Reginald. Would he have understood? Would he have supported her decision? She closed her eyes, praying she was making the right choice. Because if she was wrong… As though in response to her prayer, a morning dove landed on the railing and cooed a soft benediction, one that felt like approval.

  Taking a deep breath, Nikki opened her eyes. “I’ll give you my proxy under one condition,” she informed him.

  That gave him pause. “Name it.”

  “You read your father’s letter. You read your father’s letter—and I mean out loud at the board meeting—and I’ll give you my proxy.” She could see the refusal building in his gaze, see him pulling back and shutting down.

  “I’ll read it, but not at the board meeting. Not out loud.”

  “It’s my wish, Jack. You gave me a wish and I’m calling it due.” She pushed and pushed hard. “Unless you’re a man who doesn’t honor his promises?”

  He swore, long and virulently. “I can’t believe you’d demand that of me. Whatever is in that letter is private and not something I intend to share with the Legitimates.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.” And she was. But she couldn’t think of any other way to heal the breach between him and his Kincaid family. She could only trust that whatever Reginald wrote would help complete the reconciliation that had begun with Elizabeth and steadily worked its way through the rest of the family until only RJ remained. “Do you agree?”

  He clamped his back teeth together. “I agree.”

  But everything about him, from his tense posture, to the blatant frustration and fury glittering in his eyes, to the growl that underscored his words, warned that he resented being forced to concede. No doubt she’d pay for that. Of course, she’d already figured that out, already allowed the hope of “happily ever after” to fade like the distant memory of an impossibly sweet dream.

  He took a single step in her direction. “Shall we seal the deal like we did at the bachelor aucti
on?”

  He didn’t give her time to react. He fisted his hands in the collar of her robe and pulled her up to meet his kiss, a hard, ruthless demand. It tasted of anger, laced with passion. It spoke of pain, underscored by hunger. It felt like a man pushed to the brink, lashing out. And yet, she sensed a hint of the tenderness that always flavored their lovemaking. She gave everything within her without hesitation, meeting his demand with her own. Showing her love in the only way she had left, knowing he’d reject the words, but couldn’t quite turn from the desire that connected them. Bound them and made them one.

  He tugged at the sash of her robe, loosening it. The silk parted, opening to him, just as she had always opened to him. He swept his hands over her. Memorizing her… Branding her… Saying goodbye. Tears filled her eyes and she wrapped her arms around him and savored these final moments together. When he released her and stepped back, she knew it was over. Could feel the deliberate withdrawal, the icing over of emotion and intent.

  “I suggest we discuss where we go from here,” he informed her.

  He turned his back on her and crossed to the railing. He planted his hands on the salt-treated wood and stared out at the ocean. It was calm today, an ironic dichotomy to his turbulent relationship with Nikki. Although he’d suggested they discuss their next step, he had no idea what it might be.

  He’d trusted her. Opened himself to her in ways he never had with any other woman. He’d let her in and she’d betrayed him. He didn’t know how to deal with it. Did he end the affair? Consider himself fortunate that she hadn’t really accepted the engagement ring he’d offered? Everything within him rejected the mere thought. He didn’t want to end things between them.

  Okay, fine. So they’d renegotiate their agreement. They’d start over and this time he’d set very clear parameters. First, all cards on the table. No lies. No secrets. And they’d go slow. Maybe that had been part of the initial problem. From the moment they met, from the moment they’d first touched, passion had exploded between them. Neither of them had been able to think straight, mainly because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. So, this time around he’d put rational thought ahead of sexual need. They would approach their relationship with calm, cool deliberation. He’d treat it the exact same way he did business, with logical steps that led to an ultimate end goal.