Hot Commodity (30 page)

Olivia got to her feet, staring at him as if she wanted to slug him, which Boston had to guess she really did.

"For your information," she snarled, straightening her shoulders righteously and lifting her chin. "I wasn’t trying to commit suicide. I was getting some aspirin because
you
were giving me a headache. When I slammed the medicine cabinet because
you
had pissed me off, the mirror shattered. Okay? And a piece of glass landed in my arm."

She shivered as she spoke the last bit and covered the bandage with her hand.

"I don’t believe you," Cameron said, though he looked less angry. "When I walked into that bathroom, you had the glass in your hand."

"Because I’d just pulled it out, bonehead!" Olivia snapped. "Suicide is for weak, stupid people that don’t care about anyone but themselves. Besides, if I had really wanted to die today, I certainly wouldn’t have cut my wrists because I can’t stand the sight of blood. And I wouldn’t have overdosed because it takes too long and usually doesn’t work anyway. I’d have just stuck a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger.
 
Like my father did."

Turning on her heel, she stormed from the room. Cameron looked devastated as he stared after her.

"Think she’s telling the truth?" Boston asked a second later.

His buddy looked miserable. "Probably." He slid into a chair and groaned out a curse.

Boston sighed. "Did you know that about her dad?"

Cameron glanced up, his eyes rimmed with red. "No."

Boston snapped his briefcase closed and picked it up. He sent Cam a sympathetic smile. "We’ll do this later," he murmured and walked out.

~ * ~

Cameron ran his hands through his hair and closed his eyes as he let his head fall back against the cushions of the chair. "Bombed that one," he muttered aloud.

Shame filled him as he recalled all the accusations he’d slung Olivia’s way. He couldn’t believe himself. He’d never met anyone less likely to hurt herself than Olivia. There was no way she’d attempt suicide.

What had he been thinking?

He hadn’t. That was the problem. He’d stepped into the bathroom, and the past had swamped him. It felt like Sienna all over again, so he assumed the worst.

His first wife had poisoned him. She’d clogged his mind, and now, all he could think of people was how mentally unstable they were and how much they could take before tipping themselves over the edge. He’d never wondered such things before Sienna had entered his life.

Cameron knew he should go apologize. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was too ashamed.

And what was all that stuff about her father? Had Olivia’s dad done himself in? It surprised Cameron he had that kind of past in common with her. Not many people had such close connections with suicide victims. Her father and his first wife. That fact seemed to bind them together in such a way he was left shaken by the knowledge. He suddenly saw her in a different light.

The blonde cupcake he’d first met, who had seemed like nothing more than a spoiled little princess, now had a past.
 
A dark, depressing past. She hadn’t been pampered her whole life by two adoring parents who gave her whatever she demanded. No, she’d ended up with Vivian the bitch for a mother and a father that had to have been at least a little like Sienna.

Cameron shivered. Needing relief from the thoughts racing through his head, he staggered to his feet and made his way to the bookshelves lining the wall. Pushing aside the largest volume of books, he reached between the two and extracted a bottle. Damn, he craved that first biting swallow.

But instead of opening it, he closed his eyes and cursed under his breath. Just as he carried the alcohol to bathroom and poured the entire contents down the toilet, the doorbell rang.

It was probably Boston. Kincaid was no doubt worried how things were going. He was annoyingly thoughtful that way. It’d been especially irritating right after Sienna had died, when Cam had wanted to be left alone the most. Yet, Boston stuck by his side through it all.

 
"Look, your concern is touching, Kincaid," Cameron muttered, yanking open the door. "But—"

His words died in his throat as he found himself face to face with Vivian Helbrock-Donovan-Roark. He blinked to clear his vision.

Vivian’s face filled with hatred, and her lip curled into a sneer. "I’ve come for my daughter," she stated in a stony, serious voice.

For some reason, a bolt of panic roared through Cameron. No! He didn’t want anyone to take Livy.

He needed her.

But then reality returned, and he realized Olivia wouldn’t go anywhere with her mother.

Relaxing, he sent Vivian a sympathetic look. "Sorry, honey. But you can’t have her."

"Look, you unethical little prick. You might have screwed me in that underhanded business dealing but—"

"Screwed you?" Cameron broke in incredulously. "I merely backed off my bid when I discovered my mother-in-law was the competition."

"—but you can’t have my daughter. I want her back. Now. And you were not thinking any such thing. You knew what would happen to me if I won that bid, you cocksucker. It’ll take me five years to regain all the capital I lost."

"Then maybe you shouldn’t have tried to undercut me," Cameron murmured, folding his arms over his chest and giving Vivian a steely look. Man, but he’d love to knock the wind out of her sails. It was too bad she wasn’t a man; he could’ve just punched her in the nose.

For a moment, Vivian’s face turned purple and Cameron wondered if she was going to keel over. But the older woman seemed to calm herself. She looked expectantly over Cameron’s shoulder into the house. "Where is she?"

"Why don’t we make a deal?" Cameron said instead of answering, aware Vivian had yet to call her daughter by her name. Something was clearly missing in the woman. Like a heart.

No way in hell did he want her anywhere near Livy, but, "If you let her remove all her possessions from your house, I’ll let you come visit her whenever she wants, and I’ll call a truce on the business level. I’ll stop screwing you over like you tried to do to me."

"I’m not making any deals with you, Banks," Vivian huffed. "Now, where’s—"

"Mother?" Olivia said in a startled voice from inside the living room.

Cameron spun around just as Vivian charged past him into the house.

"Olivia!" she cried out in relief.

Okay, so the lady remembered her name after all. So what? That didn’t mean—

Cameron briefly thought the old broad was going to throw herself at her daughter’s feet and wrap her arms around Olivia’s ankles, kissing the very ground she stood upon. Olivia looked like she was thinking similar thoughts because she skipped a nervous step back.

"Olivia," Vivian repeated, sending her a desperate smile as she reached for her daughter’s arm. "You’re coming home with me. Right now."

Olivia pulled her hand away before her mother could catch her. "What?" She cast an accusing look Cameron’s way as if this were all his doing. Then her gaze veered back to Vivian. "No. I don’t think so."

"But, Olivia. You have to. I want—no, I need—you back, darling."

Darling
? Cameron watched Olivia’s face as she blinked rapidly, clearly bowled over by the term as well.

Vivian sent her a tenuous, begging smile. Her lips quivered; Cameron almost swore he saw a tear in the bitch’s eye. "But you’re my little hostess, sweetheart. I can’t—nothing’s been the same since you left." Then, lifting the back of her hand to her mouth, she sniffed, like she really was crying. "Nolan’s dead."

Olivia stumbled back a step, her eyes growing large. "Dead?" she repeated. "How? When?"

"We buried him yesterday. It was a massive stroke. He…" Vivian’s voice choked; she paused a dramatic moment. "Too many clogged arteries."

"I-I’m sorry," Olivia said softly.

Cameron shifted uncomfortably as he watched the two women. He suddenly felt crappy for being rude as soon as he’d opened the door. He wasn’t sure if he should offer his condolences. Hell, he wasn’t even sure who Nolan was, though he suspected it was Vivian’s husband, the same old geezer he’d kicked out of Olivia’s hotel room in Chicago, because Vivian continued with, "I have no one now. I need you."

She stared her daughter straight in the eye and made no comment about Olivia’s bandaged wrist or the paleness in her cheeks. There was no way the woman could’ve missed them. Cameron was all too aware of everything mommy dearest skipped over, like asking whether Olivia’s new husband had been treating her right or telling her daughter she loved her.

"You must come back with me, Olivia. I can’t be by myself."

Olivia blinked her long-lashed eyes and looked blankly startled. "I-I’m sorry, Mother," she said, looking seriously regretful. "But I’ve started a life here. I’ve made friends, gotten a job, and—"

"You really did get a job?" Cameron blurted out.

She spared him a brief, hard glance for interrupting and, as he

snapped his mouth shut, turned back to her mother.

"You might need me, Vivian. But I don’t need you. And I’m sorry for your loss, but I know how quickly you bounce back after your spouse dies. You’ll find some poor man to control in no time. Besides, my life is here.
 
In Kansas City."

"Olivia," Vivian nearly whispered. "Please."

She opened her mouth, looking absolutely clueless as how to deal with this stranger her own mother had become. "I-I...No," she said. "I’m staying."

Vivian’s face frosted over. Her back straightened, and she once again became the woman they both knew and despised. "This is it then," she said with a sneer. "You just made your bed with him. Don’t ever come crawling back to me. And don’t bother trying to retrieve your things either. They were gone the day after I got home from Chicago."

Cameron watched his wife swallow a lump in her throat. But she bravely tilted her chin up and answered, "That’s all right. I didn’t need anything from your house, anyway."

Pausing a moment to send her one last evil glare, Vivian turned on her heel and stormed from the house. She brushed by Cameron, knocking him back a step, and slammed the door on her way out.

No one spoke for a good minute after her departure. For once, Cameron couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Olivia was obviously still steamed at him over the whole cut-wrist misunderstanding.

"Did you call her?" she finally said.

His mouth dropped. "What? Hell, no."

She gave a single, thoughtful nod before asking, "What’d you do to her?"

Cam was suspiciously quiet for a moment. Then cautiously, he countered, "Why do you think I did anything?"

"Oh, maybe because you said, ‘I’ll stop screwing you over like you tried to do to me’."

Cameron grinned suddenly. "Oh. That."

"Yeah. That. You must’ve hit her hard. I’ve never seen her look so beaten before."

"Well, we, uh, we kind of screwed her out of a business deal, or rather
into
a business deal."

Olivia shook her head, not comprehending.

"Boston and I had been looking into buying out this company, you see. And, well, your mother found out about it. I guess she was still ticked at me for taking you away, so she tried to buy it out from under us and screw me over. But what she didn’t know was that we were going to merge it with this other company we own. So, when your mother starting putting in these outrageous bids to make us raise our offer, I decided to let her win the auction."