When Empires Fall (56 page)

“And I’m too patient.” She laughed breathlessly, pushing him down onto the floor, her gypsy eyes alight with passion and humor. Behind her, the lamplight glowed golden in her hair, giving her the appearance of a dark angel, mischievous and divine.

When she spoke again, her words rang out into the night like sacred bells, haunting and spectacular. “There’s no holding back now, Grant. Just know that I love you.”

Staggered, he rose up to crush her mouth with his, abruptly flipping her so she was beneath him, pressed into the rug. Her answering moan echoed through to his very bones.

No, there would be no holding back, he thought as he swiftly lost himself in her. Not anymore.

T
he wine soothed the worst of the ache, but did nothing to heal the wounds.

She continued to sip it anyway, enjoying its tartness and rich, velvety texture as it slid smoothly from the glass and onto her tongue. It was a fine bottle of Australian Cabernet, a 2001, aged to perfection.

Madison curled her legs beneath her as she sat on her wide, black leather sofa, wine glass in one hand and her grandfather’s letter in the other. Across the room from her, a fire crackled in the dark slate fireplace. Above it, her television was set on a rock music station, and the husky, sultry voice of Stevie Nicks flowed into the room.
Rock on, gold dust woman…

She’d lit candles in place of turning on lights, dozens of them, so that the darkness of her living room glowed with rich, golden light that flickered shadows off the ceiling. Somehow, oddly, it helped quiet the restlessness in her heart.

Her father had died today. Tomorrow, she would bury her grandfather.

Most people would crumble under the grief of such awful luck. But not her. No, she would not crumble. Not now, not ever.

Sipping her wine, she lifted the letter and perused over her grandfather’s tiny, scrawling words, considering them thoughtfully. The words that formed the sentences that built the instructions in the letter were carefully chosen, deliberately used, and poignant in their efficiency. Cyrus had left no loopholes, no doubts as to what he wanted and no room for discussion. In short, she would be required to follow his demands to the tee, or lose everything.

It amused her to see her own brother’s idea, the one she and Grant had so flatly overturned only weeks earlier, as number one on Cyrus’ list. According to him, the people who were most likely to shun the Vasser family were those in high society, the elites, those people whose allegiances changed direction as quickly and easily as a brisk wind in October. So screw them, Cyrus demanded, and revamp the image of the company entirely. Adaptation, he said, was key to any creature’s survival. And if the hotels were to survive the damage he had caused, they were going to have to toss tradition out the window and try new things. Hilton did it. So would the Vassers.

Corporatize. It was a word that had been tossed around in her family circle before, usually as a bad joke. Now it was going to be their reality.

They would retain the current hotels as their luxury line and would invest in buying up smaller hotels to convert into Vasser full service and focused service hotels for business class and leisure travelers. It would be a transition that would take years to implement, but it was what was required to bring the Vasser Hotels to a new level of prominence in the hotel industry. Otherwise they’d simply be left to wallow in the dust of dying traditions.

Linc was going to be pleased, Madison mused, setting aside the letter and staring at the fire. Already he had mentioned something to her about drafting up a fresh proposal for how to revamp the company. It seemed he was more determined than ever to make his ideas a reality, now that it was undeniably obvious that they needed a drastic change of course.

She would just have to find some way of preventing the victory from going to his head. His ego was big enough already.

Grant would be disappointed. But even he could not deny the blow Cyrus’ sins had dealt to the family empire, the loss of revenue and the bad press it had caused. Eventually the press would die down and people would forget about the scandal, but their reputation had taken a big hit. As long as people associated the name Vasser with the words
murder
and
suicide
, they were in trouble.

So the best way out was to give people something else to associate the name Vasser with. Something fresh, something new and improved. Excellence and prosperity. Perseverance. Americans loved a good rising from the ashes tale of success, and Madison was more than ready to give it to them.

The Vasser name wouldn’t die a miserable, bloody death on her watch. On the contrary, she planned to breathe as much life into it as her lungs could hold.

Feeling more confident, she downed the last of the wine in her glass. The rest of the list would have to wait until step one was presented and planned for.

As long as the family was willing to work with her on the first step, revamping the company image, then she would proceed in disclosing the rest of her instructions, bit by bit, at a pace that wouldn’t alarm them more than they could handle.

Because what she was going to have to do would definitely scare them. That was a fact she could not avoid. They weren’t going to like the changes she was going to have to make in order to keep the family empire afloat. Drastic changes that were borderline suicidal.

If corporatizing and restructuring the company meant making enemies of them all, then so be it. She had never really been a part of them, anyway. She had been, since she was nine years old, trusted with a much harder and more divisive task. Cyrus had trusted
her
; not his own sons, not her brothers or her mother. He had groomed
her
, and her alone, for this pursuit, which he must have known would be an inevitability all along.

He must have known that the truth would one day be revealed and the brashness and arrogance of his youth would cost his heirs their entire legacy.

So he had prepared her as his successor and planned and plotted his way to the very grave.

Could she blame him? Of course not. If she had been in his shoes, she would have done exactly the same. But then again, they had always shared such similar minds, had come from like molds.

Except, of course, the coldness required to kill.

A dirty and frozen bitterness settled into her stomach then as she tried to push thoughts of him from her mind. Her heart had been dealt a heavy enough blow from
that
betrayal of faith. It wouldn’t do to dwell on it any longer.

On impulse, perhaps instinctually in an attempt to distract herself, she grabbed her cell phone from her coffee table and began scrolling through her contact list, all the way to the bottom.

To the Ws.

She found his name and without thinking called him.

Before she could even regret her decision he answered, his voice thick with liquor and dark and mean with misery.

“
Yeah?
” Wyatt growled. She heard the sound of him taking a swift swig of beer and immediately felt her hackles rise.

“You’re drunk?” she hissed, rolling her eyes, instantly furious.

There was a long, silent pause, where she could only hear the background sounds of people talking, laughing. A baseball game was playing and it was the second inning. The bartender called out for more potato skins for a hungry patron.

When he finally spoke, he’d lost all the meanness in his voice. It had been replaced by complete and utter loneliness.

“
Hey, sweetheart.
”

“Hello,” she managed, rubbing her left temple gingerly with her free hand as her heart raged violently in her chest.

“
Is something wrong? Are you okay?
”

“No. Where are you?” Her hand fell from her forehead and clutched immediately to the silk fabric of her shirt, right over her heart. It couldn’t seem to settle, to quiet down, no matter how hard she willed it to.

“
Atlantic City. I’ve been here since…well, since I found out
.”

Madison nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. “You shouldn’t be surprised. He was a weak man.”

“
Damnit, woman, he was my friend
,” Wyatt snapped, his temper sparking. She could all but feel the heat of it through the receiver. “
He didn’t deserve to go like that. No one does.
”

“But he did. There’s nothing we can do to change it.” For the first time since she had found her father’s body that morning, her throat clenched miserably and tears threatened behind her eyes. She breathed out the first sob in silence, not wanting him to hear. Not wanting to accept it herself. “The police said it appeared he was on drugs. We won’t know until the toxicology report comes in.”

Wyatt sighed and she heard him take another drink from his beer, only to then order something stronger from the bartender. “
What do you want from me, sweetheart?
”

She started to say she didn’t know, but stopped herself before she could. Hadn’t she decided only days earlier to try and play his game right back on him? Now was as good a time as any. He was clearly weak and intoxicated, grieving and miserable. It wouldn’t take much to convince him that she was lonely, get him to drive into the city to her townhouse, drag him into her bed. No; all of that would be pathetically easy.

But she’d be damned if she would tell Wyatt the truth, that she missed him. Needed him, even. And that she was horrifically close to crumbling with grief over the death of a father she had always claimed to never love. But she had. Oh, and the pain of losing him quite simply devastated her.

“I wanted to see if you would like to get lunch with me sometime, catch up. Like old times,” she lied, struggling to keep the sadness from her voice. The isolation. “You left so abruptly the other night. We barely had the chance to talk.”

“
I got the impression you didn’t want to talk to me. And it was a pretty crystal fucking clear impression.
”

“I was just caught off guard by you being there,” she said lightly, even as the hand that held her phone was trembling. “Seeing you…it reminded me of what we had.”

He snorted out a derisive laugh and she scowled down at the phone angrily.

“What? You don’t believe me?” she demanded hotly, letting her anger take over.

“
Oh no, I believe you one hundred percent.
” He chuckled darkly. “
But I know you, Madison. I know how that sexy mind of yours works. Never in your wildest dreams would you willingly submit to me this way. It isn’t in your nature, sweetheart.
”

She pursed her lips and seriously considered throwing the phone into the goddamn fire. Instead, she softened her voice on purpose and prepared to lay it on thick.

“I’m not the same girl I was, Wyatt,” she began, imagining sliding her hands over his chest and nipping at his jaw line with her teeth. It was an image that helped put the seduction in her voice almost instantly. “And when I saw you, I realized that I wasn’t over you. Had never been over you.”

He said nothing for a few moments, as if considering her words and trying to figure out her angle. She only rolled her eyes and damned her heart for believing in the words she had spoken even while her mind laughed in the face of it all.

“
I’ve never met another woman since you that I could trust with my life and yet never for a goddamn minute would I trust any word she says.
”

Fuming and wild with sudden, rampant emotion at his words, she clenched the cell phone tightly in her hand until her knuckles were white. “Same goes, then. You had promised me you would always be there, and yet you still left, Wyatt.”

“
I had my reasons
.”

“Reasons,” she repeated in a hiss, the amber in her eyes flaring bright gold. “Well I hope they were good reasons.”