The Heir From Nowhere (8 page)

She’d been alone since he’d gone. No wonder she looked so gaunt. Who was there to look after her? Who was there to ensure she ate properly or make sure she took proper care of herself? There was no other option.

‘Get some things together,’ he ordered. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You can’t stay here. You’re coming with me.’

‘No, I’m not. This is my home. At least …’ She trailed
off mid-sentence and Dominic found himself wondering how many more secrets she had left to reveal.

‘At least what?’

‘I got a letter today.’ She nodded towards the table where the page still sat. Then she swallowed, her hands either side, gripping the bench top behind her. The action emphasized the leanness of her arms but, surprisingly, it also emphasized another part of her anatomy, one he hadn’t taken much notice of until now. For, without her cardigan to cover her, her singlet top pulled tight across an anything-but-flat chest. What the hell was he thinking? He snatched up the letter, concentrated on that.

‘Shayne took the car and most of the furniture when he left. He said that was enough. Now he’s telling me he wants his share of the house. But it’s my house! My mother left it to me. He can’t do that, can he?’

The raw pain in her eyes touched him in a place he didn’t know still existed. This house meant that much to her? But of course it would if it was all she had.

‘I’ll have my lawyers look into it,’ he said, folding the letter. ‘But you know you can’t stay here. I don’t want you staying here, knowing he’s out there, knowing he could turn up at any time making demands.’

‘I’m getting the locks changed.’

‘You think that would stop him if he wanted to get in? No way in the world can I leave you here alone knowing he’s out there, knowing what he wanted for my child. No way can I trust him anywhere near you. Don’t you understand that?’

‘But don’t you still need his agreement to take this baby?’

‘Let the lawyers take care of that as well. You think about what you need to pack just enough for tonight, I’ll send my people to pick up the rest tomorrow.’

‘Hang on. I haven’t agreed to anything!’

‘What do you have to stay for? You have no family and no husband. You have nothing, except a child that doesn’t belong to you.’

How dared he talk to her like that—as if she was a nothing and a nobody he could order around at his whim? She stiffened her spine and kicked up her chin, sick of men who wanted to tell her what to do. ‘I still have this house. Or at least a share of it.’

‘And you’re welcome to return to your share of it after the baby is born. Rest assured, I’ll be the last person to stop you.’

She huffed off to her bedroom and packed her bag, just an overnight one for now, like he’d said, his words stinging in her ears as she flung in her pyjamas.

Damn the man!

So, maybe he had a point. Maybe she would be better off right away from here and from Shayne until this baby was born. Maybe it would be better for the baby. Safer.

She pulled open a drawer, grabbed some clean underwear and slammed it shut the way she would have liked to have slammed Mr Rule-The-World Pirelli with a few choice words of her own.

I’ll be the last person to stop you.
He’d said those words as if he couldn’t wait to see the back of her.

Well, fine, she didn’t want a baby and she sure didn’t want to hang around him any longer than was absolutely necessary, but why had she been struck dumb? Why couldn’t she have told him that?

I’ll be the last person to stop you.
Too late she thought of all the things she could have said—should have said—in response.

I wouldn’t want you to stop me.

Just try to stop me.

You won’t see me for dust.

But she’d said nothing and she knew why. Because his words had hurt. Because it hurt to feel so utterly worthless. It hurt to be abandoned. It hurt to know you were a loser and a failure on so many counts.

Hopeless wife.

Broken marriage.

She couldn’t even manage to have the right baby.

Her underwear joined her pyjamas. She looked around the room. What else? He’d said he’d have his ‘people’ organise the removal of whatever else she needed tomorrow. Who the hell was this man that he had ‘people’ to do things, like a general with an entire army at his disposal, just waiting for him to bark out the next order?

She wrenched off her day-old top and pulled on a clean singlet top, threw another in the bag and reached for her thin cardigan, threading her arms through the sleeves. Too hot still for long sleeves but in the absence of full body armour she was going to need all the protection she could get.

The bathroom was her next stop, adding her hairbrush and a small bag of toiletries to her stash. She was back in the living room in ninety seconds flat.

He was making a call when she returned—probably organising a room for her somewhere or barking out more orders to his ‘people’, his eyebrows going north when he took her in. He snapped the phone shut. ‘What took you so long?’ he said as he reached for her bag and this time she almost did let fly with a few choice words. Until she saw the turned up lips and felt the urge to hit him instead. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You are. I thought the mouse was going to roar again.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He took her bag and their hands brushed and she felt that unwanted sizzle of electricity again. His smile evaporated instantaneously.

‘Don’t do that!’ she said.

‘Do what?’

‘Don’t touch me.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, his lips tight as he led her to his car, clearly unhappy to be lumbered with her. But that wasn’t her problem.

Her problem was him.

She’d been furious. Blood-spitting furious. And then with one comment, one tiny tweak of his lips, she’d felt the rug pulled out from beneath her, leaving her senses reeling and her thought processes scrambled.

He’d smiled and she’d faltered and lost her train of thought along with her anger, even with that mouse reference? Was that how he thought of her? A mouse? Little, drab and ordinary.
And clearly amusing.
She bristled, not sure if she resented the fact he thought she was drab and amusing, even if she was to someone like him, more than the fact he seemed to occupy more than his fair share of the car. And what he didn’t cover with his significant frame, his damn scent filled the rest.

Spicy and warm, woody and real.

Real.

There was that word again. She remembered she’d thought it the first time she’d seen him smile. Strange. She couldn’t remember ever thinking it about any man before. Maybe it was because he was so unreal in so many ways. His obvious wealth. His mountain-like
demeanour. The way he dominated a room or a restaurant or any other space just by being there. Maybe that was why she noticed it when he reminded her he was just a man.

Just a man?

Who was she trying to kid? He was unlike any man she’d ever met before. He had presence and power and the ability to set her skin alight with just the brush of his fingers. She shivered. He made her feel uncomfortable on so many levels and she didn’t like it. She didn’t want to feel so vulnerable and so aware of any man, married or not. After Shayne, she had sworn off men for ever.

Every last one of them.
Especially the arrogant ones who wanted to rule her life. And especially the ones with black-as-night eyes who laughed at secret jokes at her expense.

Damn the man! She squirmed in her seat, the car filled with the scent of him, desperately needing a distraction.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked in the stony silence, when they had left the side streets of Sherwill far behind and were heading east along the ribbon of highway towards the city. The traffic was busier now, close to peak hour, the tailbacks longer.

‘You’ll see.’

‘What if I don’t like it?’

‘You’ll like it,’ was all he offered, before he turned the radio on to the news channel, terminating the conversation. The stock market closing reports came on and Angie expected he’d change the channel, like Shayne had always done if he’d happened to stumble across it accidentally while flipping through the stations, but he didn’t. He hung on every word. She tried to make sense
of it but clearly they were speaking another language and she tuned out.

‘What is it you actually do?’ she asked when the report had finished and he’d turned the volume down again, the city closer now, the buildings in the distance ahead growing taller.

‘The simple version? I invest.’

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘I play the share market. I buy shares low and sell them higher.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘So you don’t actually make anything.’

‘I make money and I use it to buy other things. Office blocks. Shopping centres.’

‘I get it.’ She wasn’t sure why but the discussion seemed significant in getting a handle on how this man ticked. ‘So you don’t actually
produce
anything, then. Anything real, I mean. At the end of the day, what do you have to show for your efforts?’

‘More money.’

Alongside him, she sighed, a strange little sigh of satisfaction, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

‘Absolutely not.’ She swept an appreciative hand along the designer dashboard, fiddled a bit with the buttons on the console. ‘Clearly you must be awfully good at it.’ He almost growled. He got the distinct impression her words had not been intended as a compliment.

His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. What was her problem? He’d dragged himself up from nothing. He’d turned himself into a billionaire, had half a dozen cars and a helicopter at his disposal and here she was saying he didn’t make anything?

‘I suppose you’d prefer it if I worked at a factory like your philandering husband.’

He caught the look in her eyes, shock giving way to a look of pain, as if she’d been deeply wounded, before she turned her head away.

And someone who wasn’t used to apologising for anything or to anyone but who’d done their fair share lately suddenly felt like a heel again.

He might be ruthless in business, but that didn’t mean he could go around kicking someone when she was down, even if she did provoke him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No. It’s okay,’ she said, now studying the hands knotted in her lap. ‘I guess I asked for it. I’m sorry.’

‘Do you miss him?’

Her head swung around—‘Shayne?’—before setting into a shake. ‘I think I actually miss the car more. The last few months have been …
difficult.
I guess if I’d had my eyes open, I might have seen it coming but the IVF treatment kind of takes your focus.’

Didn’t he know it? ‘There are always things we should have seen coming and yet somehow we miss them until it’s too late.’

And he felt her cool blue eyes on him, felt their questions and their wondering. He kept his own eyes firmly fixed on the traffic.

In his peripheral vision he picked up her shrug. ‘Anyway, I’m glad it’s not Shayne’s baby. I don’t think I could have coped with learning about the affair while thinking I was carrying his child.’

Did she realise how wrong she was? This was a woman who’d been abandoned because she’d stood up to her husband and refused to abort a baby that wasn’t even hers, a woman who was somehow planning to
struggle through that pregnancy alone to give birth to a baby she didn’t even plan on keeping. This was a woman who could pack an overnight bag in ninety seconds flat when most women he knew couldn’t do it in under ninety minutes.

Sure, the woman might look like a mouse but she had a spine made of steel. It had taken courage to call him and even more courage to agree to meet him after that angry first phone call. And she’d been afraid—so afraid and so unsure and so quick to cower down as if she wished she could disappear. But, in spite of her fear, in spite of a sickness that left her weak and pale, she had turned up, only to have to defend herself against his accusations.

He glanced down at his watch before turning on the radio for another market update.

‘Believe me,’ he said gruffly, genuinely surprised to find a germ of respect for her in his thoughts, ‘you would have coped.’

She didn’t get a chance to ask him what he meant. He kept the radio on, absorbing a never ending stream of information. She tried to make sense of it. Minings. Industrials. NASDAQ. All Ords. But there was nothing she could relate to, nothing to anchor it to her life, and eventually she gave up and simply enjoyed the journey and the growing sense of anticipation welling up inside.

And she was excited, she realised. She’d left her home, the one home she could ever remember living in to go—where, exactly? He’d turned off one highway before reaching the city and onto another major road that seemed to snake its way though tree-lined suburbs that looked more and more wealthy, the houses bigger,
the gardens more and more beautiful. Every now and then she’d get a glimpse of harbour and blue water and anticipation bubbled up inside. It was like going on one of those mystery holidays where you didn’t know where you were going until you got to the airport, not that she ever had. But Shayne had used to talk about doing one some time. He might actually do it now with Abigail.

No! She gave herself a mental slap to the head. She refused to waste her time thinking about Shayne. Not now. Not after all the things he’d done. Wherever she was going, it would be much better than anything she could do with Shayne. Dominic Pirelli might be arrogant and controlling and judgemental, but he wasn’t cheap.

Wherever he had in mind for her accommodation for the next however many months, it wouldn’t be substandard. Maybe not because he cared about her, but because he wanted the best for his baby.

Which wouldn’t be so very hard to take, really. It would be like having a holiday at someone else’s expense.

A six-month holiday.

Why shouldn’t she at least try to enjoy it?

The snatches of sea became more frequent and the concept of a holiday more tantalizing and seductive by the minute. They were close to the beach now. She could smell the tang of salt in the air—such a different air to where she’d come from, where the air seemed weighted down with dust and heat and desperation. And then he pulled into a street filled with houses that looked like mansions where the sea lapped practically at their feet.