Fierce (Not Quite a Billionaire)

by Rosalind James

  Really? My inner voice mocked. Not even at first? When all he’d wanted had been to add me to his list? Who knew what he’d said to Martine to get her to agree to my going to Paris? Who knew what he’d actually said to her about my being “needed by Marketing,” the day I’d gone to San Francisco?

  No. Hadn’t I just been thinking that I saw him, and I knew him? When had he ever been less than honest with me, even when a lie would have served him better? These past weeks—when had he been less than kind, and thoughtful, and...honorable?

  Never.

  So I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to go there. I was going to wait for him to come home—or, better yet, for him to call me tonight—and ask. Like a reasonable adult woman who loved and trusted a man.

  I turned from the window, went back to the table, and began to move everything to the desk. I wanted Hemi to take me seriously? Then it was time to get to work. I might be about ten giant steps below the CEO, but what I’d told him was true. I could do a job if I were given a chance, and I’d been given one. Maybe it wouldn’t be this job, in the end, because the signs weren’t looking good. But I could do something, and it was time to start proving it.

  Which was when there was another knock on the door. Housekeeping, probably.

  I went to the door and opened it for the second time in an hour. But it wasn’t housekeeping.

  Such A Lovely Gift

  The man was dressed in a dark suit, and carrying a paper bag. He asked, “Hope Sinclair?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a delivery for you. Could I see some ID, please?”

  “Some ID?” I stared at him blankly. Is this some...am I in some sort of trouble?”

  I was being served with papers, I thought wildly. Hemi hadn’t paid the hotel bill, and they were demanding...what? The emotions that had been ping-ponging so wildly for days were at it again, and I yanked them fiercely back under control. No. That was ridiculous, because the man was smiling.

  “I don’t think you’re in trouble,” he said. “It’s a delivery. I just have to see ID first, and to get you to sign for it.”

  “Oh. OK.” I went for my purse and pulled out my driver’s license. “Here you go.”

  He scrutinized it against my face, nodded, and handed me a computer tablet to sign. Once I did, he handed over the bag and said, “Enjoy.”

  I shut the door, opened the bag, and pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in pale-blue paper, tied with a white satin bow. And my heart leaped in my chest.

  Tiffany.

  I sank down on the couch and pulled the bow off with trembling fingers, then opened the box, pulled out the velvet case inside, lifted the lid, and gasped aloud.

  It was a bracelet, but that word wasn’t nearly enough to describe it. Flowing, sinuous waves of sapphires in varied shades of blue were interspersed with undulating lines of diamonds. It was the sea, exactly the sea, all shifting blues and foaming white. It was beautiful. It was spectacular. It was way over the top.

  The better it’s been, the better the gift.

  I had a sudden thought, scrabbled wildly through velvet case and blue gift box, turned the bag upside down, picked up the ribbon again in search of something I knew wasn’t there.

  No card. No note. Because what would a note from Josh say?

  I remembered the note with the shoes. You could call it an apology. The one with the flowers. Can’t wait for Paris. Can’t wait for you. I had a sudden thought, a hysterical surge of hope, rummaged through my purse for my phone, and fumbled for my texts.

  Blank.

  I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I shoved the impossible thing back into its velvet case, didn’t bother with the gift box or the bag, picked up my keycard, and ran.

  It had to have been at least an hour since Tiffany would’ve delivered it. I’d had my phone off, tied up in an endless meeting with the attorneys and finance people, but surely she would’ve left a message. But—nothing.

  Maybe she’d been out, I thought, and almost slapped my forehead in annoyance. But—wait. She’d told me Martine was coming over that morning to discuss the work. She wouldn’t have gone out. And if she had, I would’ve had a call. I’d left instructions.

  I paced from the living room to the bedroom once again, not taking in one bit of my surroundings, unable to concentrate on the emails I should have been answering. The suite at the Four Seasons Milano could have been the Holiday Inn, for all I was aware of it.

  Had she hated it? Had she thought it was over the top? Or had she…I turned on a heel again on the thought as if walking faster would allow me to outrun it.

  Had she decided, after all, that what I was offering wasn’t enough? Now that Karen was out of danger, was Hope looking at her situation clearly for the first time, deciding that she didn’t want a man who could never be there for her the way she needed him, could never say the words she needed to hear? Whose silences and absences were more than she could bear? All Hope’s warmth, the shining force of her spirit—had it hit the wall of my reserve one too many times?

  I should have talked to her before I left, no matter how shattered she’d been. I should never have left her in any doubt. I should have called her more often and said it all then, and the hell with how hard it would’ve been to do it over the phone. I should have gone back sooner, no matter what. Or not have gone at all.

  But this was who I was. This was all I had. My drive, my ambition, my success. Hope had known I wasn’t good at love, that I didn’t know how to do it, and she’d loved me anyway. At least she’d said she had. Once. What if she’d decided it wasn’t enough?

  The phone vibrated in my hand, and I glanced at the caller ID. The leaping hope was there for a second, then gone in an instant.

  “Te Mana.”

  “Mr. Te Mana, this is Charles Farquar at Tiffany,” I heard. And then, damningly, the hesitation, and even before the man spoke again, I knew. I knew. “I’m sorry, sir, but the bracelet came back.”

  “Came…back.” My blood was ice. “How?”

  “The messenger said…” More hesitation.

  “Just tell me,” I snapped.

  “Yes, sir. He said that he was still in the lobby when the lady came…flying out of the elevator. Agitated, he said. That she shoved it at him and said, ‘Take it back.’ I’m sorry, sir,” he said again. “We’ll credit your account, of course.”

  I didn’t answer. I was already hitting the End button, getting my pilot on the phone.

  “Warm it up,” I said. “We’re going home.”

  Maybe I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was going to be the thing that defeated me. The thing that crushed me.

  But I was going to do it anyway, or I was going to die trying.

  Letting You Burn

  I landed at JFK after the most uncomfortable flight of my life to find a single voicemail. It was from ten hours earlier, and it told me nothing at all.

  Hope’s voice, not sounding steady. “Hemi. It’s me. But you’re not there. Call me when you can. If you want to.”

  I didn’t call, because it was almost two in the morning in New York. I went to the hotel instead. And heard at the front desk that Hope and Karen had checked out at noon the day before.

  They were gone.

  I almost told Charles to drive to Brooklyn, but I didn’t. If Hope thought I was too much for her, too demanding, how would she feel if I turned up at three o’clock in the morning and told her she was coming back to me? I couldn’t possibly be reasonable, not now, and I needed to be reasonable.

  I was always in control. Always. Except now. Now, I was nowhere close, and I was going to have to do better. Starting by turning up at a reasonable hour and talking to her like a reasonable man.

  In the end, it took me nearly twenty-four hours from the time I’d left Milan before I was standing on a snowy sidewalk and pressing the buzzer for their apartment. When a fella came up behind me and opened the door with his key, though, I didn’t hesitate. I followed him inside. If Hope did
n’t want to see me? That was too bloody bad. She was going to see me anyway. I didn’t understand any of this, but I was going to.

  So much for reasonable.

  I took the four flights of stairs two at a time, then stood outside their door and knocked. When I didn’t get an answer straight away, I may have lost my equilibrium entirely and pounded on the door.

  They had to be here. Where else would they have gone?

  “Hope!” It was a bellow. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. “HOPE!”

  The door opened just as my fist was coming down on it again, and I spun with the effort to pull the punch, not to hit Karen in her poor abused head.

  Because it was Karen, not Hope. Karen, looking…looking well, even though a bandage still covered the crown of her head. And somehow, despite the adrenaline, the fury, the grinding frustration, I softened.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” I ran my hand gently over the fuzz that had begun to grow back to cover her naked scalp. She still looked vulnerable and plucked as a baby robin, and I kissed her cheek and asked, “How you goin’?”

  “I’m good. I mean, I’m good. I hardly hurt, and it’s…” She laughed. “It’s amazing, you know?”

  “Yeh,” I said. “I know. How about letting me in?”

  She stepped back. “Oh! Sorry. What’s going on, though? I don’t get it. Did you break up with Hope? Is that why we had to leave the hotel?”

  “No.” I could hear the grimness in my voice and couldn’t help it, because it had all come straight back again. “It wasn’t me. I’m here to find out what it was. Where is she?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  I was across to it in three strides, because that was how tiny this grotty apartment was. I knocked on this door, too, but I didn’t pound this time, because I’d reminded myself of that “reasonable” thing again.

  She was hiding from me. Why? That wasn’t like Hope. She’d always faced me, no matter how forbidding I may have seemed, no matter how much a lesser woman would have quailed.

  “Hope,” I called out. “Open up. Talk to me.”

  The door opened, and she was on the other side, her mouth opening in shock. With headphones in her ears, and her laptop and files sitting on the bed.

  Oh. She hadn’t heard me.

  She yanked the headphones out, seeming to be struggling herself for something to say. “Hemi. You’re...you’re here.”

  “Yeh.” I put my hands on my hips to keep from grabbing her. “Tell me what’s happened to make you leave me, and I’ll make it right. Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. Just tell me.”

  “Leave you? I...I didn’t.”

  “What?” Now I was the one staring. “What do you mean, you didn’t? You moved out. You gave back the bracelet. Why?”

  “Oh, boy.” She ran a hand through her hair, took in a deep breath, and blew it out. “I can’t...I can’t process. I think we’d better sit down. And I—did you mean it? The bracelet?”

  “Did I mean what?”

  She was sitting, collapsing onto the bed as if she couldn’t stand up anymore, and I sat beside her and took her hand, because I needed to touch her. My heart was galloping, and her pulse, I realized, was racing just as fast. Something had gone very wrong, but it wasn’t going to stay wrong. We were going to fix it. I knew it. I could feel it, and just like that, the emotions had shifted directions yet again, leaving me gasping in their wake.

  “Give me a...a second to explain,” she said, not sounding any steadier than I felt. “It’s sort of a...it’s a long story. It was Martine. Well, at first it was.”

  “Martine?” Of all the things I’d expected to hear, that was the last.

  “She came to see me yesterday. Well, you know that. And she said…she said that you gave her that necklace she wears all the time, and that when that extravagant present came for a...a woman, it was the…” Her voice wobbled on the words. “The end. That that was goodbye. And I thought that you’d had me working for your old mistress. I couldn’t believe you’d do that, though. I couldn’t. I told myself I was going to wait to talk to you. But when the bracelet came after all…” Another breath. “I just...I snapped. I’d been up and down so much, and I know that’s an excuse. I know I should have waited for you to explain. I knew it a couple hours later. I had the most horrible feeling that I’d gotten it all wrong. And then I couldn’t reach you, and you didn’t answer, and I thought again...I thought I must have been right. And the longer it went on, that I didn’t hear anything, that you didn’t call...”

  “Because I was on my way back to you.” She’d been up and down? That made two of us. “I was on the plane. Thinking the same thing. Thinking I’d stuffed up somehow, not knowing how to make it right. But Martine? No.” There was rage there now, but not at Hope. At Martine, and at myself. I should’ve seen this. I should’ve known it. “I gave her that necklace to say ‘thank you’ after our very first Milan show. She worked bloody hard, and she did well, and that’s why she’s where she is, but after today, she won’t be. She’s going to be gone. Because I never slept with her. Never. And I guess she was bitter about that. And hard work or no, she’s gone. Today.”

  “No.” Hope was looking up at me, the urgency clear to see, and something else, too. Distress? Why? “No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to work for her anymore, but I don’t think you should fire her. I think it just burned her too much, having me foisted on you. I think, on some level, she might even have been trying to...trying to help. She was jealous, but I don’t think that was all. I think she thought she was telling the truth. Not the truth about that, but the truth about you. Except it’s not the truth. You know what I realized? Last night, when I was thinking? When I was so sure of how I’d screwed up, and so worried that you’d never forgive me?”

  She’d left me behind again, but that was nothing new. “What?”

  “I realized I was the one being the king. I was the one letting you burn, the one without any loyalty, without any faith. I’ve always read that swan story and thought, how could he do that? And then I did it. Me. I heard something from somebody else, somebody who was jealous, and I believed it. I believed in that person instead of believing in the person who’s proven to me, again and again, that he’s real, and he’s trustworthy, and he’s honest, and he’s good. I didn’t believe in you, and I was wrong. And I thought, No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to let that fire get lit. I’m not going to let you burn. I’m going to wait and ask you. But I didn’t want to be in the hotel to do it. I wanted to be here, at home, where I was...where I could be strong.”

  “Sweetheart.” My arm had gone around her, because I could no more keep from holding her than I could have let her burn. “You’ll never be the person without faith. Never. And you can be strong anywhere. And much as I’d like to say that I can’t believe you didn’t trust me, I know exactly why you didn’t. I haven’t been a man a woman could count on, and I may have given some women jewelry, too. Martine was right about that. But with you, it was different. This wasn’t goodbye. This was…this was ‘I love you.’”

  I’d never said the words before, and now, I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t feel scary. They felt right. They felt necessary.

  “Oh.” She was trembling again, but maybe for a different reason this time. “Oh. I’m so…Oh, Hemi. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I doubted you. I kept telling myself that I knew you, that this wasn’t you, but I let the past take hold of me all the same, and I’m so sorry. But there was no note, and...”

  The tears were pooling in her eyes, running down her cheeks. And she didn’t even try to hide it. The second time she’d let me see her like that, that she’d let me know her, and I was never going to let myself forget what a gift that was.

  “No, sweetheart,” I managed to say. The tenderness was doing its best to overpower me, my chest swelling with it as if my heart had grown. Because it had. Because she’d made it happen. “I’m the one who’s sorry. There wasn’t a note because I wasn’t man enough to say th
e words, even to somebody else, so they could write it down for you to read. I’m sorry that it’s taken me all this time to say it, and to let you know it, and to be the man you need. But I’m going to do my best to be that man now.”

  “You’ve always been the man I need.” She wasn’t trembling anymore. She’d pulled herself together, because that was Hope. So strong and fierce in her love, so gentle in her touch. The tears were still there, but she was smiling through them. Her eyes were steady, her hand was on my face, and everything I needed was in that hand, in those eyes. “And I love you, too. Of course I do. I love you so much.”

  “Then…” I pulled the velvet case out of my pocket, the one I’d stopped to collect on the way here, because I’d been determined that I was going to put it around her wrist, even if it was the last thing I did before she said goodbye to me forever.

  I opened the box and pulled out the circlet of sapphires and diamonds, the dingy surroundings and dim winter light of Hope’s bedroom unable to diminish their flash. “Then, please. My Hope. Please let me put this on you. Please tell me that I get to keep you. Please let me love you.”

  Epilogue

  It was June, and once again, I was exploring a new place. But with such a difference this time. No five-star hotels, no suites, no haute cuisine. This time, Hemi wasn’t trying to impress me, and as a result, he was impressing me so much more. He’d taken me home to New Zealand to meet his grandfather.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d needed a passport, either, because we’d brought Karen with us. It hadn’t even been a question. Hemi’d just assumed she’d come, and if I hadn’t loved him already, I’d have loved him for that alone.

  As of yesterday, we were in Katikati, staying in the little house where Hemi had spent his teenage years. A house that stood on a hillside, surrounded by fruit trees and gardens that were barren now in winter but showed all the promise of spring in their tidy, well-maintained borders. Green-clad mountains rose behind us, mountains Hemi had promised to explore with us tomorrow on a “track that you may find a wee bit steep,” which I’d already figured out was Kiwi understatement for “impossible.” Emerald-green fields stretched in front of the house, sloping all the way down to the town below. And beyond that, there was the impossible blue of the sea. A sea that was disturbed today by whitecaps, the ruffled surface reminding me irresistibly of the bracelet Hemi had given me, and letting me know why he’d chosen it. Because it had reminded him of the land he loved most, and because he’d wanted to share that with me. Just like he’d wanted to share this.