A Catastrophe of the Heart - A Billionaire Romance Novel (Romance, Billionaire Romance, Life After Love Book 3)

by Nancy Adams

  “Little strawberries for my little strawberry,” Margot gently exclaimed with a big grin.

  They were shopping in the Beverly Center, currently strolling around the Gucci clothing store kid’s section. They’d already been to Prada, Ralph Lauren, Lacoste and many others, and both women were stacked with bags from the heavy trawl of shops.

  “Oh my!” Margot exclaimed as she whizzed off toward the shoe section, leaving her shopping behind.

  On reaching the baby shoes, she immediately picked up a little pair of soft sports shoes and held them preciously in her hands, gazing lovingly down at them.

  “Look at them,” she said in a soft voice, looking up at Juliette, “his first pair of tennis shoes.”

  Juliette smiled warmly at her friend.

  Once they’d made several purchases, the two friends waddled out with their shopping and made their way to the food court to have some lunch. It wasn’t long before they were sitting down munching salads, their table surrounded by a field of shopping.

  Looking around at all the bags, Juliette remarked, “I don’t think he’ll ever get to wear all of this. I mean, won’t he have grown out of it all in six months? And with the amount we’ve got here, even if he wore each outfit only once, he still wouldn’t have worn it all within six months!”

  “Well, I’ll just have to redress him two or three times each day,” Margot retorted.

  “You probably would,” Juliette said, grinning casually as she did.

  “Back in Manhattan, when I was a girl, we had cats,” Margot began as she ate her lunch. “My mother liked them. I guess because they were cold and uninterested, like her. Anyway, out of boredom, I used to dress them up in my dolls’ clothing and push them around in prams. I loved it—obviously a lot more than the cats, who’d often run the very moment they saw me galloping toward them. Only one cat—a big ginger tom named Red—ever let me do it. I guess he enjoyed it. He would just relax when I dressed him up.”

  “Well, let’s hope that baby David is as relaxed as Red.”

  Margot smiled and tucked back into her salad. She began to gaze over at a mother with two little boys. She watched as the mother wiped the younger son’s face after he’d made a mess of it eating a rather large slice of pepperoni pizza. The mother showed such concern with the child as she wiped his little hands. Then the older boy dropped his pizza onto the floor and as quick as a hawk, seeing it out of the corner of her eye, the mother left the youngest and swooped around the table to the other boy. She instantly stopped his hand as he reached down to retrieve the fallen pizza off of the mall floor.

  Margot smiled at the woman’s ever-ready skill of motherhood, before slowly turning away from the family scene and looking across at Juliette once again.

  “Juliette?” she said.

  “Yes, love?”

  “Do you think I’ll make a good mother?”

  “What a silly question—of course you’ll make an absolutely fabulous mother. You have everything you need to be the perfect mother. You’re not selfish and have so much love in you.”

  “It’s just I worry,” Margot continued, “that because the baby’s not biologically mine, I won’t be able to bond with him, he’ll reject me.”

  “Of course not. A baby only knows the mother that nurtures it, the mother that takes care of it, feeds it, clothes it, shelters it, teaches it and loves it. David will only know one mother, Margot: you.”

  This made Margot warm inside and she let out a gentle grin.

  “My own mother,” she said, “was horribly cold, as I’ve told you on many occasions. She’d never had to want in her life and therefore was never allowed to live. Because that’s what living is, isn’t it: striving to survive. Her own father, my grandfather, had been a rich banker who’d come out of the great stock market crash of 1929 with most of his assets still attached. She was born into money and never knew anything accept that. Her mother was a society girl who raised her daughter to be nothing more than an exact copy of herself—one object crafting another. She was brought up to throw the most lavish parties, always wear the best fashions and be the talk of town for all the right reasons. But this wasn’t the sole object of my grandmother’s tutelage. She also taught my mother another fine skill: how to get herself the wealthiest of husbands.”

  “Not a bad skill, that,” Juliette said with a smile.

  “Not if you want to be anything other than an object. After everything, my mother was left as nothing but a hollow shell, a programmed robot. She met and married one of the wealthiest Manhattan and American real estate tycoons, gave him three children, and then found herself with nothing left except the odd, hollow engagement. She found herself isolated and cut off, her life slowly fading into insignificance more and more each day. You see, she’d done right by marrying into money, but unfortunately hadn’t found someone that shared in her love of an open house. My father, being the private type, forbade my mother from ever throwing any elegant parties at his houses. She was reduced to forever attending the social engagements of other people and was never allowed to return the custom. In the end, she even stopped going to other people’s parties and merely shut herself away in our penthouse apartment with her booze and her pills.”

  Juliette could sense a sadness in her friend’s voice, so she reached her hand across and placed it affectionately on Margot’s.

  “She was so cold, Juliette,” Margot let out in a soft whimper. “So very cold. Most of the time you could tell by her eyes and the way she slurred her speech that she was full of meds. It’s why she died by the time she was fifty-two, looking like an old woman of eighty, pickled by the booze and the pills. I was twenty by then and hadn’t seen her for a year. I refused to go to her funeral. I kinda regret that now. After all, she was my mother.”

  “You were young and the young are so easily filled with sharp emotions, whether that’s love or hate,” Juliette remarked to her friend. “My own mother was a wonderful woman who I loved with all my heart. I never told you where she was when she fell pregnant with me.”

  “No, you never did,” Margot said with a smile. Then, slapping her hands together, she exclaimed, “Ohh! Juliette’s conception.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for a sordid tale, you’ll be richly disappointed.”

  “Oh!” Margot muttered.

  “For my mother met my father—the love of her life—in a Nazi concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War.”

  “No way!” Margot exclaimed, placing her hand over her mouth.

  “She was twenty-two and Romany gypsy. Like most of the other Roma peoples in Italy at the time, my mother had been rounded up and eventually sent to a death camp somewhere in Poland. She was rounded up with two sisters, her mother, father and several other relatives. When she returned to Italy afterwards, it was only her.”

  “What about your father? You always said that you never met him.”

  Juliette gave Margot a look of incredulity.

  “Really Margot—haven’t you worked it out? My father died at the camp.”

  “Oh!” Margot exclaimed. “Well, he could have been a guard.”

  “I see your point, but he wasn’t. My father was a Jewish Kapo, not a Nazi soldier.”

  “What’s Kapo?”

  “It’s someone who helps to run the camp from the inside, like a trustee in a prison.”

  “Inmates helped the Nazis to run the camps?!” Margot let out.

  “Of course, it was the best way to stay alive—stay useful. My father was clearly trying to survive and with his position, he was able to keep my mother alive for nearly eighteen months. It was only at the end when the S.S came to incinerate the camp that my father was murdered.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “Anyway, my mother was a strong woman and she survived that terrible time, and at the end of the fighting, while she was heavily pregnant with me, she walked hundreds of miles back to Italy where she had me only two days after arriving back and finding herself in an Ally cam
p run by Americans. After that, she brought me back to the Tuscan countryside and raised me among what was left of the Roma people in the wilderness of the countryside, surviving on our wits in a country desecrated by war. She never went with another man and supported me on nothing more than her astute shrewdness, with no family to support her and only a handful of friends within the small community. It near as damn killed her. I remember how weak she always was. Back then I always took it for granted that she was simply a sickly woman. But as I got older, I realized that she was going without food for my sake.” Juliette paused for a moment, the old woman’s eyes becoming teary. “She was always such a sad woman,” she went on. “But she was always too proud to show it. People used to call her that: proud. And she was. Very. But at night I used to lie awake listening to that poor woman sob in her sleep, howling at the moon for her wretched lot and the suffering that she’d had to bear.”

  “It must have been so sad growing up with her,” Margot remarked.

  “It was and it wasn’t. I had fun growing up in the countryside and my mother always did her best to put on a happy face. I guess she did what all good mothers do: everything she could.”

  Margot smiled and the two continued to eat in silence.

  Once they’d eaten, they heaved the shopping to the car and drove back to Malibu, a contented optimism permeating Margot as she happily motored back to her beach house. When they arrived, the two friends walked in to find Jules putting the cot together and Claude finishing off the painting. He was currently stenciling little silver and gold shapes onto the blue walls: little stars, moons and other childish profiles. When the women came in, both men gave them kisses and the four all went down to the kitchen where Margot showed off their buys.

  Juliette stood to the side and watched the light burst from her friend as she joyfully showed her husband the items she’d bought. As Juliette gazed at them, a tinge of sadness was fluttering its wings inside of her. Never would she wish to deprive her friend of the joy she was currently feeling, but something in Juliette hurt to see her friend so happy over her new child.

  In short, Juliette was jealous, something that wasn’t lost on her. She wasn’t stupid and had been on the planet long enough to know when she was feeling envious. And the source of her envy: the child. She wished to have a child. After Danny, she had been so hurt from the experience of burying one child that she hadn’t dared risk the chance of burying another. For that, she’d spent the next eighteen years on contraception. That was until she hit the menopause two years ago and her biological clock ceased to tick for good.

  With that final declaration on her chances of motherhood, Juliette realized that she had missed the chance. Now, watching Margot so joyful, she felt in her heart that she was to forever miss something in her life. Ten years. Ten years was all she’d had with Danny. Ten years a mother. And a bloody good one too. But that was it. Ten years and then nothing.

  Sporting a sad smile, Juliette continued to watch Margot show off the clothes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paul held Claire’s hand delicately as he helped her up the stairs of her apartment. It was three days since the birth, and earlier that day he’d gone to fetch her in his car. He’d come straight from an exam that he’d just taken, one that he’d had very little time to prepare for since most of his free time had been spent with Claire taking care of the pregnancy. But he didn’t care. So long as he passed the year and he got Claire through this sad time, Paul was more than happy.

  “I forgot to ask,” Claire said as they reached the front door of her apartment, “how did your exam go?”

  “Fine. I guess. I mean, I hadn’t studied as much as I would’ve liked. But that’s fine.”

  Claire gave him a sad look as he opened the door. Feeling a little wave of sorrow pass over her at the thought of her being the perpetrator in him missing so much study these past months, she placed her hand delicately on his shoulder and stopped him as he stepped into the apartment.

  “What is it?” he asked, turning to her with a smile.

  Claire wrapped her arms around him and drew him in.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into his ear. “I’ve placed so much on you these past months.”

  “Hey,” Paul said. “You shouldn’t be sorry. You fell into trouble—made a one-time mistake and paid way too heavily for it—and luckily I was there to help you. Anyway, this whole thing has helped me in many respects. My old man is always shouting at me to grow up and I think I did a pretty grownup job these past few months. Don’t you?”

  Claire gave a large grin and squeezed him even tighter. She brought her face up to his and they began kissing passionately on the threshold of her apartment. Once they’d finished, they went inside and Claire was amazed to find that the place had been cleaned from top to bottom while she was away.

  “My gosh!” she exclaimed as she walked into the lounge to find that none of the mess she’d left it in was still there.

  “Yeah,” Paul said as he guided her to the couch. “I took the liberty of coming over while you were in the hospital and giving the place a bit of a spruce, so that it was nice for when you got back.”

  “You really are too sweet, Paul.”

  This made the young man grin from ear to ear, and with this smile still plastered to his face, he helped Claire ease herself onto the couch. The girl was still a little tender from the birth and the midwife had told her that she’d probably be sore for the next two to four weeks.

  Once she was seated, Paul stood in front of her and said, “I also took the liberty of getting you the Friends boxset on DVD and I was thinking to order some pizza in, or maybe Chinese?”

  “Oh, it has to be pizza,” Claire exclaimed. “And Friends, you absolute dear!”

  “I’ll put them on now if you like,” he said. “We can skip the kiddy episodes, so none of them will bum you out.”

  “You really are the best Paul,” Claire grinned widely at him. “You put on the DVD and I’ll call Dominoes.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Claire grabbed her phone from her pocket as Paul put on the television. The first channel it landed on was the news channel and Claire's thumb suddenly froze over the phone as the name Sam Burgess rang out throughout the room. Paul changed the channel to the DVD and Claire turned to him and snapped, “NO!” He instantly looked up at her. “Turn it back to the news,” she added.

  It seemed like some moment of fate to her—some kind of message—his name being mentioned the second the TV came on, especially just after she’d returned from the hospital after having his baby.

  Paul turned the channel back to the news and watched Claire with a slightly bemused expression. She had gone very pale and her eyes were glimmering with tears as she watched the screen, her hand over her mouth.

  Meanwhile, on the television, anchorwoman Jenny Armstrong was explaining how footage had emerged earlier that day of Sam Burgess in a romantic involvement with his psychiatrist, Jenna Blackwell. Claire sat trembling as the anchorwoman talked to celebratory psychiatrist Amy White and showbiz columnist Randy Cole.

  “So, Amy,” Jenny was saying to her guest, “what does this mean to Jenna’s career? Because as we know it from our sources within the company, Blackwell was employed at the start of their affair by Techsoft to evaluate Burgess’s state of mind after the death of his wife only nine months ago. So essentially she was his doctor and he her patient.”

  “Well, Jenny,” Amy replied, “if it is indeed proven that this is the case, then Jenna would be in violation of doctor-patient ethical relations and would be therefore brought into disciplinary proceedings by the state medical department.”

  “And this would mean?” Armstrong pushed her.

  “Effectively that her license to practice would be revoked. Especially if it is proved that she deliberately involved the patient in sexual relations.”

  “Not good,” the anchorwoman said with a slight frown, before turning to her other guest. “So Randy,” she contin
ued, “the news so far is that Blackwell approached several leading newspapers in the days prior to staying with Burgess. What can you tell us about that?”

  “The story currently,” the showbiz columnist began, “is that Blackwell approached both the L.A Times and the L.A edition of OK! magazine with the offer of a tell-all story on Burgess. It’s claimed that, though both papers declined to work with Blackwell immediately, they did tell her that they would be interested in anything that she had after her stay at Burgess’s Cliff Face house. So it kinda looks like Blackwell may have been plotting this one all along. You know the story—vulnerable guy, wife’s just died, she’s a writer, writers like to sell books, books about steamy affairs with billionaire tech superstars sell. It’s pretty easy to weigh this all up. Plus, there’s the added detail of the sex tape.”

  “Okay,” Armstrong put to him. “But the source of the tape—the now already-infamous sex tape—who’s the source of that?”

  Randy shrugged slightly and said, “Everything’s speculation at the moment. No one’s come forward and claimed responsibility. So far it’s being circulated by L.A pornography producers the X Brothers who are refusing to name their source. But if I were to guess, I’d say that this has come from Blackwell’s people.”

  “Blackwell’s people?!” Armstrong exclaimed. “You’re implying she’s got people, Randy?”

  “I’m not implying, Jenny. I’m stating that Blackwell’s probably got a whole team of PRs lined up ready to deal with it all.”

  “Well, thank you for that,” Jenny said as she turned away from her guests and toward the main camera, looking straight at her audience. “Blackwell’s current whereabouts are unknown,” she continued to her audience at hone. “When this all broke, she was unavailable and neighbors at her large Beverly Hills apartment block said that she’d been gone since coming home early that morning and leaving almost immediately after arriving. However, if we get—”

  The television switched off and Claire glanced over at Paul. His face was very blank, his eyes wide and he appeared to be glaring at her.