by Various
She smiled slightly, even though the memory of him still hurt, hurt more than it ever should, considering how little they really knew each other. Had known. Max Monroe was in the past; there would be no opportunities to know him more, or at all, in the future. She would do well to remember that.
A black-suited PA rose from behind a streamlined glass-topped desk and walked over to her. ‘Zoe Balfour?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Anderson will see you now. I’m afraid he only has a few moments. He’s got—’
‘Back-to-back meetings,’ Zoe filled in. ‘So I heard.’
The PA threw her a startled look and Zoe realised how terse she sounded. She forced herself to smile.
The PA tapped on a pair of double doors of burnished mahogany before throwing them open and ushering Zoe into an office as huge and sleekly decorated as the waiting room. At the end of what seemed an acre of plush carpet a man waited behind a desk, his back to her. He gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows of tinted glass at the bustling street below, a forest of skyscrapers stretching to the horizon.
Zoe recognised him from the photo she had, a grainy shot featured in the business section of the New York Times. His thick mane of salt-and-pepper hair, the wide set of his shoulders—she didn’t even need to see his face to know this was the man she’d been looking for.
This was Thomas Anderson.
Her father.
Still, she wasn’t prepared for the lightning bolt of shock that sliced through her when he finally turned, and she gazed into a pair of eyes as jade green as her own. She’d always felt like an anomaly among her sisters, with their dazzling Balfour blue eyes, the same as their father’s. Hers were so different, and now she knew where those eyes came from, who had given them to her. And they were gazing at her now with an expression of cold courtesy.
‘Miss Balfour? How may I help?’
He had no idea why she was here, Zoe thought numbly. Or at least he was good at pretending he didn’t.
‘I believe you knew my mother, Mr Anderson. Alexandra Balfour?’
He stilled, the expression in his eyes turning wary before it quickly cleared. ‘I don’t—Yes, a long time ago. I had business in London one summer and I believe we may have met.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Pardon me, Miss Balfour. I’d assumed you came here to ask on behalf of a charity or some such. I have numerous such requests and—’
‘That’s not why I came.’ Zoe spoke through stiff lips. Not unless she was considered a charity. ‘And you know it.’ She didn’t know where she found the courage or the conviction to say the last, but she knew it deep in her bones. Thomas Anderson knew exactly why she’d come here. He had to at least suspect. ‘I expect, being in finance,’ she continued coolly, ‘you’re rather good at maths.’ He shrugged, and Zoe continued. ‘It will be twenty-seven years ago this June that you met my mother.’ She paused, watching him. ‘I turned twenty-six in April.’
The silence was electric and went on for too long. Thomas Anderson’s gaze had turned terribly cold. ‘I’m afraid, Miss Balfour, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Zoe stared at him, not wanting to feel the well of disappointed hope opening up inside of her, consuming her. Had she actually thought he might accept she was his daughter? Open his arms and embrace her like some prodigal child? And would she have even wanted that?
At least a small, desperate part of her would have. She recognised that by the disappointment and despair swamping her now. Her nails dug into her palms and she lifted her chin. ‘I don’t know how much of it reached the papers over here, Mr Anderson, but a little over a month ago a story broke at the Balfour Charity Ball—a scandal.’ She paused; her father’s expression didn’t change. ‘The story was that my mother—Alexandra Balfour—had an affair twenty-seven years ago, and her youngest daughter was actually illegitimate.’
The smile he gave her was chilly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t read the kinds of papers that run those stories, Miss Balfour.’
‘No, you just live them.’ The vitriol in her words shocked both of them, but Zoe didn’t apologise. ‘This episode of my mother’s life was discovered in an old journal she kept. She named you as my father.’ There. It was said. It wasn’t exactly true—she hadn’t written his name—but how many American businessmen spent a summer in London, had been invited to Balfour Manor and had eyes the colour of jade?
Thomas Anderson stared at her for a long moment, and for a second—no more—Zoe thought he would admit it. Explain. Apologise. She longed for it, for the explanation and, more importantly, the acceptance. Then she saw a flicker of regret pass across his face like a shadow and he turned away from her, back to the windows.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t have an affair with my mother?’ Zoe demanded in both disbelief and despair.
He paused, a tiny hesitation but telling nonetheless. ‘I knew your mother socially, for a very brief time.’
‘So she lied?’ Zoe said, her voice turning raw. ‘In a journal she hid in a children’s book, a journal she never expected anyone to see, she lied?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Thomas said again. His back was to her, and his voice was low.
‘Just what are you sorry for?’ Zoe demanded. ‘Fathering me or not being able to admit it now? I could have a DNA test done—’
‘That would involve a court battle,’ he returned sharply. ‘I don’t think either of us want to go there.’
More scandal. More shame. ‘Why don’t you want to admit it?’ Zoe whispered. She felt the sting of tears behind her lids and she blinked hard. ‘We have the same coloured eyes,’ she added in a choked voice. ‘No one in my family—no Balfour—has eyes that are green like mine. But you do.’
She saw his body tense and when he turned to her any possible trace of compassion or pity had completely vanished. He reached to press a button on his telephone. ‘My security guard, Hans, will escort you out, Miss Balfour. I believe our conversation is finished.’ He paused, his eyes—so green and so cold—meeting hers. ‘I don’t think I need to warn you that if this story spreads somehow, I could sue for slander.’
Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘You’re threatening me?’
‘Just stating a fact.’
She shook her head, her gaze falling on a large sterling-silver picture frame on the desk. Slowly, numbly, she reached over and turned it so she could see the photograph inside. It was a picture of a family.
A woman in her early fifties perhaps, with a stylish bob of silvery hair, and two boys and a girl. The girl, she saw with a terrible, creeping numbness, was actually a woman, about her own age. The boys were younger, perhaps in their teens.
He had a family. Of course. She stood there, gazing at her half-brothers and half-sister who would never know her, who would never want to know her. She didn’t belong with them. She didn’t belong with the Balfours.
She didn’t belong anywhere.
Behind her the doors opened, and she felt a firm hand on her elbow. ‘Miss Balfour, let me show you out,’ a man said, his voice polite but unyielding.
Zoe shook off his arm. ‘Don’t touch me.’ She turned back to Thomas Anderson, who was looking at her as if she were a bug he had just neatly squashed, a mixture of distaste and relief. ‘You can deny it all you want,’ she choked, ‘but you and I both know the truth.’ Hans grabbed her arm again, leading her backwards. Zoe gazed at her father, hurt and hatred boiling up within her and firing her words. ‘We both know,’ she said, ‘and I’ll never, ever forget this. Never.’ The last word ended on a sob and, shaking off Hans once more, she turned around and strode from the room.
She wasn’t aware of the curious gaze of her father’s PA, or the several businessmen who entered the elevator on various floors as they sped down to the lobby. She ignored the woman at the front desk and the security guard who opened the door.
She could feel nothing but her own pain, see nothing but the look of utter reject
ion on her father’s face. It was her deepest fear, her worst nightmare, and she’d just lived it.
Her head felt light and her vision swam; she tasted bile. She needed to find some composure, some control, but she couldn’t even begin to know how. She took a deep breath, and another, trying to steady herself, but her stomach heaved and she bent over double, cold sweat prickling on her forehead.
From her handbag she heard the persistent trill of her mobile and with a wild, impossible lurch of hope she wondered if it was her father ringing, having second thoughts, wanting to apologise.
It was Karen. ‘Zoe! I just wanted to make sure you’re coming out with us tonight. There’s a new club opening in the Village—’
Zoe leant against the side of the building and closed her eyes. Cold sweat still prickled on her forehead and her mouth tasted metallic. ‘Is there?’ she said dully. She could barely even make sense of Karen’s words.
‘Yes, of course there is! You sound a bit funny.’ Karen sounded torn between impatience and concern. ‘Are you all right?’
Zoe leant her head back against the brick wall. For an insane moment she wanted to confide just how not all right she was. No, I’m not all right. I’ve been rejected outright by two men—maybe even two of the most important men in my life—in the space of two weeks. I don’t know who I am or what I want to be, and I know I should have figured that out by now. I’m so scared.
‘I’m fine.’ Karen wasn’t the kind of friend who wanted to hear about those fears. She didn’t have that kind of friend.
‘So are you coming tonight?’
Zoe opened her eyes. ‘Yes.’
She went out to the club with Karen and a bunch of New York friends determined to forget Thomas Anderson and Max Monroe. Both men—and their almost identical looks of sneering indifference—haunted her, their cold words of denial and rejection replaying in her mind, echoing through her heart. Still, Zoe tried to make a good show of it, dancing and laughing and flirting even though she felt so brittle inside, ready to break. After only an hour the club’s pounding music made her head throb, and the cocktail she’d been drinking tasted sour. She left it virtually untouched on the bar and went in search of the loo.
The harsh lights in the ladies’ put her own pale face into awful relief. She looked terrible, Zoe thought rather distantly as she waited in line for an open stall, her arms creeping around herself in a self-embrace. Two women in skimpy dresses and stiletto heels were putting on lipstick in front of the mirror.
‘I had such a scare last week,’ one of them said, her eyes on her own reflection, and Zoe found herself listening, curious despite her own sense of lethargy.
‘Oh?’ The other woman asked in a rather bored drawl.
‘Yes.’ She smacked her lips together and slipped her lipstick into her bag. ‘My period was three days late, but thank God I wasn’t…’
‘Pregnant?’ The friend filled in as she put her own lipstick away. ‘What a nightmare.’
Zoe watched them both sashay out in their spiky heels, and she didn’t move until the woman behind her in the queue tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Are you in line or what?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ Zoe mumbled. ‘No, I’m not.’ She half stumbled out of the bathroom, her mind buzzing.
Such a scare…three days late…thank God I wasn’t…
Pregnant.
Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.
The word beat a restless tattoo in her brain. Even in her numb state she could do the math. Her period had been due—what? More than three days ago. Almost five. And she was annoyingly regular, as predictable as clockwork, but—
Max had used a condom. It had just been the one time.
She felt like a teenager, stupid and careless, demanding that this couldn’t happen to her, it didn’t work that way.
She couldn’t be pregnant.
She wasn’t, she assured herself. She was stressed, she was unhappy; those things made a difference.
Still, she could hardly stay at the club without the question answered, and without even making her excuses to Karen or any of her friends, she left the pulsing music and flashing strobe lights for the rain-slicked street. She hailed a cab and headed uptown, stopping only at a twenty-four-hour chemist’s to pick up the necessary item.
A pregnancy test.
Twenty minutes later, back in the apartment, she stared at two pink lines, and then the leaflet explaining the results. She stared at the lines one more time, and then read the leaflet again. There was no escaping it, no denying it.
She was pregnant. With Max Monroe’s baby.
Just the thought of Max made her stomach clench. He’d sent her packing after one night; what on earth would he do when—if—he discovered he was the father of her child?
Yet even as this question formed in Zoe’s mind, she realised there was no if about it. The life inside of her was tiny, fledgling, but it was there. It was part of her, part of Max, and with a sense of something—her whole self—settling into place, she knew this was where she belonged.
And Max needed to know.
It took Zoe three days to work up the courage to face Max. First she had to find him. She couldn’t have found her way back to his apartment building if she tried, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to confront Max in the place that was his own domain, where they’d made love. If what they’d done had anything to do with love, which she now knew it hadn’t.
Still, it had resulted in a child, a life, and for that alone Zoe knew she had to tell Max. A quick Internet search gave her the address of Monroe Consulting, an office building near Wall Street, right on the water, and Zoe made her way there.
She felt a sickening sense of déjà vu as she crossed the threshold. A row of security desks faced her, guarding the entrance to the elevators which led to the exclusive offices upstairs.
A bored security snapped his gum as he looked up. ‘Who are you here to see?’
‘Max Monroe.’
The guard nodded and reached for the phone. Zoe watched, her heart thudding as it had before, hardly able to believe that she was in the same awkward, uncomfortable, excruciating position she’d been only three days ago. Once again she was about to confront a hostile man and give him the unwelcome news that he was a father.
And this time it mattered even more.
‘Name?’ the guard asked, cradling the receiver to his ear, and Zoe swallowed nervously.
‘Zoe.’ He waited, and she added rather grimly, ‘Just Zoe. He’ll know who I am.’
The guard shrugged and spoke into the receiver; Zoe couldn’t hear what he said. After only a few seconds he replaced the telephone in its cradle. The look of boredom had been replaced by one of prurient interest. Zoe flushed. ‘He says he’s not expecting you, miss.’
‘I didn’t ring beforehand,’ Zoe confirmed with what she hoped passed as a gracious smile. ‘I hope Mr Monroe isn’t averse to surprises.’
The guard shrugged. ‘He sounds like he might be. He doesn’t want to see you anyway.’ He paused before he turned back to the newspaper he’d been reading. ‘Sorry.’
Zoe stared at the man in disbelief, her flush intensifying, spreading through her entire body in hot, prickly colour. Max Monroe wasn’t going to even let her come to his office. He wasn’t going to see her at all.
She drew in a shaky breath even as her vision swam and nausea rose in her throat. ‘I see,’ she managed. ‘Thank you.’
On legs that very nearly tottered she made her way out of the building. She stood in the middle of the concrete concourse in front of the building, the breeze from the Hudson River blowing her hair into tangles around her face. She took two, then three, deep lungfuls of air, trying to steady her nerves, her shaking body. Even now, after one spectacular dismissal, she could hardly believe she’d been given a second. Max Monroe wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to tell him about his child.
And she, Zoe determined, was not going to give him the opportunity to escape.
Max sat
back in his chair, discomfort prickling along his body, through his thoughts. Why had Zoe—just Zoe—come to see him? He’d made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of pursuing a relationship or even setting eyes on her again. He couldn’t. Yet she’d tracked him down to his office and attempted to gain access—why?
Max had done his best to forget her and the night they’d had together. It took a surprising amount of concentration not to think about someone—the scent of her hair, the silken feel of her skin, that unexpected, throaty gurgle of laughter.
And more than that…the way she’d touched him, with such gentle hands, as if she felt something. Loved him, even. He still could feel the touch of her lips on his skin, his scar, and the answering agony of need inside of him.
No. He needed to forget, not to remember. There was no future, no hope. Besides, he told himself, rising from his chair in one abrupt yet fluid movement, she wasn’t worth his time. She was shallow. Insipid. A vapid, vacuous social butterfly. The only reason she’d been so angry the morning after their night together was because her pride had been hurt. Nothing more.
She probably preferred to be the one to say goodbye.
He had to believe that.
Slowly Max walked to the floor-to-ceiling window to behold a view that was fading all too rapidly. He could see the sun, a golden ball of fire in the sky, glinting off the buildings below, setting the whole world alight.
Only that morning he’d had his regular appointment at the ophthalmologist, to monitor the rate of retinal degeneration.
‘You seem to be holding steady,’ the doctor had said, as if this were encouragement. Max just shrugged. ‘You’ll have moments of good, even perfect, vision,’ Dr Ayers continued, ‘followed by increasing blind spots, floaters and periods of darkness. As I said before, it’s not a seamless process.’
‘No.’ He had experienced those alarming and exhilarating moments where it seemed as if his vision had cleared—as if he could see—only to have it all fade to blurry grey again. It felt like a taunt.
Just as knowing Zoe was looking for him felt like a taunt. He wanted to see her again, feel her again, and he couldn’t.