by Mia Caldwell
“I could do that.”
“You think she’ll believe it coming from you rather than me?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Eddie shook his head for a third time. “Not a chance.”
“Why not?!”
Eddie shrugged. “She knows we’re friends.”
“Right now, I’m having severe doubts about that myself.”
“More to the point,” Eddie continued. “You’re my boss, I have to do as you say – you could have ordered me to say this on threat of firing me.”
“But I didn’t! Tell her I didn’t!”
“She’s only got my word for that,” Eddie explained. “And you’re my boss, I have to do as you say. It’s catch 22 really. More to the point again, I’m a man.”
“What?” Nick could feel himself getting a headache.
“In these sorts of situation, a woman is never going to believe a man telling her that she’s misjudged another man. Women believe that men stick together in these situations: bros before hos, bitches be crazy – all that crap. And the fact is, they’ve got a point; men do tend to stick together and help each other get the girl back. And they’ll tell lies to do it. As a gender, we’ve dug our own graves on this one – years of lying for sex has made us very untrustworthy. You can see that women have a point.”
By now, Nick was more or less ready to slap Eddie round the head and tell him to say something useful for once. But it wasn’t Eddie’s fault. Nor was it really the fault of those spectacularly unlikely rules of chance that dictated that Zoe should only hear the worst possible part of his conversation with Adam.
The fault was Nick’s.
He had been ignoring and denying the fact all afternoon because what he had said had not been so bad when taken in context, but the fact was that he had thought all that stuff about Zoe in the first place. He had taken one look at her and judged her on the spot, and if he had not had the opportunity to get to know her better then he would have continued to believe that wholly unfounded and erroneous judgment.
How many times had he done that to other women? Tens? Hundreds? He was a handsome man who attracted more than his share of women – how many had he discounted and mocked because of how they looked? Shame flooded his entire being. Well, he was paying for it now, which was fair, but so was Zoe, which was not.
It didn’t stop there either.
He had made the bet.
He had made a bet on another human being without their knowledge or permission. Once again he had treated Zoe like an object, not like a person at all. All the things that he had said about Adam were true but a month ago they would have been true about Nick as well.
What sort of person gambled on another person? One without any respect for his fellow man (or woman). And while Nick was happy to say that the bet had ceased to matter to him once he had begun to get to know Zoe, that was demonstrably untrue. As soon as he had heard that he had ‘lost’ the bet, he was on the next plane to contest it, still eager to get what was coming to him, or at least not lose what he already had. And he had done this knowing that Zoe would rather have gone to the vineyard.
Presented with a straight choice between time spent with the woman he loved and winning a bet, he had gone with bet. And if he hadn’t done that then none of this subsequent horror would have occurred.
On the good side, these events had let him know what was really important and had forced him to face up to an unpleasant side of himself that he now planned to get rid of. On the bad side; it had all happened too late.
He had lost her.
“What are you going to do?” asked Eddie.
“Everything damn thing I can.” Maybe he had lost her, maybe there was no getting her back, but Nick was not giving up. His life to this point had been spent almost entirely in the service of things that simply didn’t matter, now he had something that mattered very much indeed, and he was not giving her up without a fight.
In two days’ time the board of RothCo would meet, after which point he would be effectively bankrupt, he had two days to, for once in his life, use his money to some good purpose.
Starting with a private jet, heading South.
Chapter Thirteen
It is natural after a heartbreak to find yourself back at the home you grew up in, alongside the people you grew up with. When the most important person in your life lets you down then it’s comforting to be alongside the people who never let you down. It’s probably a bit selfish, because those people are also the people who least want to see you hurting so much, but they don’t mind.
Zoe sat cross-legged on her childhood bed with a stuffed raccoon called Lion hugged in her arms. Initially, when she had entered the room, she had resisted the urge to turn to Lion for solace – she had been drawn to him instantly as she always had as a child when things had gone wrong, but now she was a grown-up and grown-ups were not supposed to rely on stuffed animals for comfort, they were supposed to confront stuff or suffer in isolated silence.
Zoe had given both these a try before muttering ‘screw this’, grabbing Lion and hugging him tightly to her. Some turned to drink in time of romantic crisis, others picked up a rebound partner for some casual sex, some buried themselves in work and still more lost themselves in trash TV. Zoe found a toy raccoon to be far and away the best cure for the blues – she was feeling better already.
She hugged Lion tighter.
When she had been a child, learning which animal was which, she had gone through a period of calling every bird a duck and a every four-legged mammal a lion. Cows were lions, dogs were lions, mice were lions. Lions were lions too of course, but that came up far less often where she lived. The stuffed raccoon had been won for her by her Dad at a travelling fair, and him handing it to her was one of Zoe’s earliest memories.
Her first reaction to it had of course been ‘Lion’, and while she had eventually learned the difference between an actual lion and a raccoon (and a cow, a dog, or a mouse), Lion had remained Lion – that was his name. He had always been there for her, and never had she felt the need of him more acutely than she did today.
The sound of a car approaching outside temporarily stirred Zoe from her reverie.
“Who do you suppose that is?” she asked Lion, who apparently had as little idea as Zoe.
It was not so odd for people to drop by the Blanchard place. Everyone liked the Blanchards and everyone knew that Davis was always available to help mend a fence and Olive would lend a sympathetic ear and freshly baked pie to anyone who might need it. And yet, for reasons that she could not fully explain, Zoe was intrigued.
Still clutching Lion tightly to her, she went to the window and looked out in time to see an airport hire car pull up. The door opened and Zoe gasped sharply and ducked back behind a curtain – it was Nick.
What the hell was he doing here?
Had he come to rub her face in the fact that she had fallen for his plot? A sad pathetic part of her insisted that the only reason he could have for being here was because he did care about her and he had come to explain that all this was a terrible misunderstanding and that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for his hateful words.
But as she thought this Zoe knew that, even were he to say such things, she would not believe a word of it. How could she? After all he had done she knew him to be a skilled liar – how could she possibly believe anything he said? It could all be part of some scheme that would wind up with her heartbroken again.
No, let him beg on his bended knee, she would not take him back, she would not fall for it again, she would not put herself in that position. But the original thought still remained, festering unpleasantly in her mind. For all her good resolutions, a part of her wanted him back; she missed him. She missed the feel of him moving over her, within her. She hated herself for this appalling weakness but she would have done anything to get back the happiness she had had in those few weeks.
Was that all that it had been?
This great relationship over which
her heart bled; a few weeks? It had seemed like so much longer. But perhaps it was not the time they had been together that she had lost, it was the time they would have had together, the time she had imagined them having together, the future she had assumed lay before them.
That was what she had lost, that was what she now mourned.
As she watched out the window, Zoe now saw her father approaching a respectfully nervous looking Nick. To Zoe’s considerable surprise, Davis did not seem angry, he was restrained, controlled, and yet firm in denying Nick entry. Nick in turn remained polite, respectful, even deferential towards the older man, but resolute that he was not going anywhere until (Zoe guessed) he had spoken to her. Davis seemed to accept this while remaining equally resolute in his own assertion that Nick was not going to get to speak to Zoe.
This apparent impasse having been reached, Davis seemed to back down a little, while asking Nick to respect his host’s wishes and stay by the car for the time being. Nick in turn seemed to agree and watched as Davis strolled back to the house, still acting far more calmly than Zoe would have expected under the circumstances.
Zoe saw the look of shock on Nick’s face before she saw her father coming back out, holding a shot gun and aiming it at Nick whilst delivering an ultimatum. Hastily, Zoe flung open the window.
“Dad! Stop it!”
Davis Blanchard looked irritably up to the bedroom window. “What? I was only going to fire a warning. At worst, maybe wing him. Dent the car a bit. Now that would hurt. That bill wouldn’t be cheap.”
“Zoe!” Nick yelled up at her. “I have to talk to you!”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you!” Zoe snapped back, trying to remain haughty and aloof, ignoring her divided nature which was currently flipping between the desire to kiss Nick and the need to burst into tears, neither of which options represented the strength she wished to project.
“That works out well!” Nick called back. “Cause I just need you to listen.”
“How about I shoot the tires?” suggested Davis, hopefully.
“Then how would he leave?” Zoe pointed out.
Davis pondered a moment. “How about if I take out the wing mirrors, or something like that, then he’d still be able to drive away but he’d lose his security deposit.” It wasn’t his ideal of revenge, but in the circumstances a forfeited security deposit was better than nothing.
“No shooting!” Zoe reiterated. It now occurred to her that there was something very odd about a man who owned a Ferrari Daytona turning up in a hired car, especially a piece of crap Ford like the one he was driving. Of course the Daytona was in France but a man like Nick definitely had other cars or could at least afford to hire a better one than this. Something odd was going down. But she could not let curiosity get the better of her. “Go away!”
“No!” Nick called back. “Not until you’ve heard me out!”
Davis leveled the shotgun once more.
“Dad!”
“What? He wasn’t going!”
“You may as well shoot me,” said Nick, moving nervously from foot to foot. “That’s the only way I’m leaving.”
Davis leveled the shotgun.
“Dad!”
“What? He said I could!”
Zoe took a deep breath. At this point, hearing what Nick had to say might be easier than having him camped out on her doorstep. But was she just using that as an excuse to spend time with him, to be close to him, to give way to her desperate desire to be with him again? That was obviously a possibility, but on the other hand; what were her current options?
She could go back into her room and ignore him, but in that case she really thought that Nick would not leave, and would either have to be dragged off by the police or shot by her father, who would then be dragged off by the police. Or she could hear what he had to say and then tell him to go, at which point she thought he probably would. What was the worst that could happen? What could he say that would make things any worse than they were?
He might try to explain what she had overheard, in which case she would simply not believe him since it was hardly mis-interpretable and would continue to despise him as the liar he had already proved himself to be. Alternatively he might break the habits of a lifetime and try telling the truth and apologizing for his behavior and his words, in which case Zoe would have a pinch more respect for him, would hope that he had learned from the experience, would thank him for his apology, and would then proceed to tell him with anatomical specificity exactly where he could shove it.
Both these options seemed to come with the assumption that he also wanted her back, because: why else would he bother coming here? Nick being the man he was, he would only have made this trip if he had something to gain. Zoe could not see how he could make money out of her once more, unless perhaps he had another bet on, and he did not strike her as a man who was hard-up for sex. Could he want her back simply because he liked her? She shook the thought from her mind as soon as it had tip-toed in.
No.
That was the weak part of her raising its pathetic head again. He was a user of women, he had never loved her, he had proven he was incapable of love.
There was one darker scenario that hovered at the back of her mind. Had he come to tell her that it was all true? Had he come here with no regret whatsoever, with no apology for what he had done or shame for what he had said? Was it possible that he had come here to make her feel worse?
It seemed a long way to come for that, but Nick Rothberger was a man with money in his pocket and time on his hands, and for some, causing distress was just a form of entertainment.
To hear what he really thought of her over that intercom had been devastating for Zoe, to hear it face to face with the man she had thought she loved, while he laughed at the fact that she had loved him… At that point she would probably just let her father shoot him. It did not seem likely that that was why he was here, but just the thought of it sent a tremor through Zoe.
“All right. I’m coming down.”
“Zoe!” Her father chided her. “He is a no-good, double timing, lying, son-of-a-bitch who abused you and our hospitality!”
“I’ll hear him out, Dad.”
In the end, only two things mattered. Firstly, she would not believe him or take him back under any circumstances – she was done. Secondly, he had already hurt her more than anyone in her life had ever done before – what more could he really do?
It was difficult for Zoe to walk out across the little distance between the house and the car, seeing Nick there. Her attraction to him was still so powerful, clashing with the contempt she felt for a man who would do what he had done. It was a hot and uncomfortable mixture of emotion and she was glad that she had taken a precaution to steady herself against it.
“Is that a raccoon?” asked Nick, frowning as Zoe approached.
“This is Lion.”
“The raccoon’s name is Lion?”
Zoe drew herself up to her full height (which didn’t take long). “Are you going to start criticizing how I named my stuffed animals now? Here I was thinking you were all out of hurtful things to say.”
One look at Nick’s face when she said that was enough to tell Zoe that, whatever the reason for which he had come here, he was not here to hurt her more.
“Zoe, I…” Nick cast about for something to say, unable to look Zoe in the face. “I knew exactly what I was going to say, but now it all sounds so… small. So worthless. Like me. That’s what I am without you: small and worthless. And I’ve only got myself to blame.”
He finally met her gaze. “I’m sorry. I know that’s pathetic and pointless and nowhere near enough to make up for what you heard, but it’s all I’ve got. Sorry.” He swallowed uncomfortably, as Zoe just stared, stony-faced. “For what it’s worth, what you heard - and I’m not making excuses here – what you heard was only part of what I said. And… just the absolute worst part you could have heard. The odds against you hearing…” he shook his head. “That’s not th
e point. I can’t blame the odds. I did think that about you.”
Zoe felt her stomach contract; she had not expected him to say that.
“But that was before I got to know you,” Nick went on. “And I know that’s such a cliché thing to say in this situation. But it’s true. And I don’t mean that once I got to know you I was able to see past your flaws to the fabulous person inside, I don’t mean that at all. I mean that getting to know you made me a better person, the sort of person who would never say those things, or even see those things in the first place. You stopped me from being the shallow, lazy jackass that I’ve been all my life, and all it took was spending time with you. You are, without any shadow of a doubt, the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, and I can’t put into words how upset I was to find out what had happened – what I’d done.”
He shook his head again. “This is all my fault. If I’d been a better person I’d never have thought those things about you at all, I’d never have made a bet to change you – and I wouldn’t change one damn thing about you! I wouldn’t have rushed back from France to try and keep hold of money when I could have been with you, which was all that mattered. Every step of the way I’ve done the wrong thing. I could’ve told you about that stupid bet at any point and ended it and just…”
He looked at the ground. “Well, no sense dwelling on what might have been. I don’t expect you to forgive me, that’s not why I came here – I needed you to know the truth. I needed you to know that all that stuff you heard was said weeks ago by a man who doesn’t exist anymore, a man I’m now ashamed of, a man that you made history. I didn’t want to leave you with any doubts or insecurities of any kind.” He looked Zoe in the eyes once more. “You are the best and most brilliant person I have ever met, and the fact that, for a moment there, someone like you maybe had feelings for me, is perhaps the only worthwhile moment of my entire life.”
He turned away. “I’ll go now. I’m so sorry.”