Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (10 page)

I stood my ground. “When would that have been? His first marriage?” I knew why I’d been so nervous this morning, why everything had felt so off. Why Hemi had been so strange.

At least, I thought I did.

Her eyes narrowed the tiniest bit, and she studied me for a moment, then said slowly, “It was yonks ago, honestly. Water under the bridge. When we were at design school, here in Auckland. Until she wanted the baby, I guess.”

Hemi

I was in a quick goodwill-cementing meeting with the lead buyer for Smith & Caughey’s when my phone buzzed.

Normally, I’d have turned it off. Today, I hadn’t. Instead, I’d left it sitting on the conference table. Now, I glanced at the screen. It wasn’t my attorney. It was Hope. I hesitated a second, then said, “Excuse me a moment,” and walked out of the room.

I never did that. Interruptions were rude, and they were unprofessional. But I did it today.

“Sweetheart,” I said the moment I was outside. “How’re you going? Finished already?”

“I need you to come pick me up.”

She almost barked it out, sounding completely unlike Hope, and I blinked. Was she getting nervy again? Overwhelmed?

“Of course,” I said. “Give me half an hour to finish here, and I’m on my way. Have a coffee, or better yet—do some jewelry browsing for me, eh. I’d like to get Violet’s ideas on earrings, maybe a necklace as well, depending on your neckline. They’ll need to be right for the dress, and as you won’t let me see it…Where are you?”

She named a café in Chancery Square, then said, “I’m not going jewelry shopping. Please come get me. I need to talk to you.”

Her voice was all wrong. Tight. Cold. “Hope,” I said slowly, “what’s wrong? Couldn’t find the dress? It doesn’t matter. I told you, I want you to feel proud when you come to me, that’s all. I already know I’ll feel that way to get you.”

A fella was walking by me in the corridor with a stack of papers, and he glanced at me sharply, then looked away. I never said things like that, let alone in front of anyone else, but that didn’t matter, either.

“Please come get me,” she said again. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then there was only silence. She’d rung off.

I didn’t even finish the meeting. Five minutes later, I was back in the car, and fifteen minutes after that, I was walking into the café.

I’d resisted the temptation to ring Walter on the drive over. My attorney knew the meaning of “urgent.” If he hadn’t rung me back, it was because he didn’t know the answer yet. I also resisted the urge to dwell on the negative possibilities. Every problem had a solution, and as this was a simple problem, it would have a simple solution.

Hope, though…not so much. She defied me, and frustrated me, and exasperated me, and then she did it again. She pushed me past every rigid barrier I’d ever placed for myself, and I kept coming back for more.

Just now, she was looking up as I walked through the door, her flower of a face tight and closed, exactly as her voice had been on the phone. I headed over there fast, and she stood up, moving as jerkily as a puppet on strings. Karen rose as well from her spot opposite her. As soon as I got there, I said, “Something’s wrong, eh. What?”

“If Hope tells you,” Karen said, “we’ll both know. You keep screwing this
up,”
she told her sister, “and I don’t get it! Hemi’s
great.
He’s
perfect.
He makes everything happen like magic, and you don’t
want
it? Why not?”

Hope said, “There’s no magic. It doesn’t exist. There’s no fairy tale.”

“Rubbish.” I was suddenly furious. I had enough on my plate just now. What more did I have to do to prove myself to her? “There’s magic, and we’ve got it. You know we do.”

“Oh?” She’d crossed her arms, and her big blue-green eyes were flashing seven kinds of danger signals. If she tended to look like a kitten, the kitten’s claws were in full evidence now. “Is that what you told your first wife, too?”

It knocked the breath out of me. That was the moment Violet chose to walk in and try to hand Hope a carrier bag.

Hope turned those eyes on her, and Violet said, “Whoa,” swiveled, thrust the bag at me instead, and said, “She wouldn’t try anything on, so I got a couple versions, plus a little something extra I thought up. Call it a wedding present, assuming you get this sorted.”

Good. I had somebody new to take my temper out on. “How does Hope know,” I asked, “about my first wife?”

She
laughed.
That was the problem with people you’d gone to Uni with. No matter how successful I was; no matter, even, that I’d helped Violet establish herself in her business—to her, I was still that bloke she’d done her group projects with, the one she’d argued with and shouted at and stayed up half the night with, whose shoulder she’d fallen asleep on. The one she knew far too much about. “Darling,” she said, “come
on.
Girl talk. If you didn’t want me to mention Anika, you should’ve said. Except that you shouldn’t have. Did you imagine that you’d get your whanau up for your wedding and none of them would’ve dropped a hint that they’d done this before? Not what
my
family’s like when they’ve been at the wedding champagne. Would you rather your bride run away from you at your reception, or at the altar, maybe?”

“I’d rather,” I said through a jaw that had tightened, “that she not run away at all. I’d
rather
she trusted me when I told her I loved her and that I’d take care of her, and left me to sort out the rest.”

“And
I’d
rather you talked to me,” Hope said, “instead of talking
about
me like I’m a child.”

“Then stop behaving like one,” I said, and could have sworn that three women sucked in their breath at once. I went on anyway, because I’d lost the battle for self-control. “Calling me out of a meeting like something’s horribly wrong instead of trying on your…” I took a quick look into the carrier bag. “Bridal lingerie? Which is heaps more important to me, and should be to you, too. So I was married before. What does it matter? And I notice you haven’t even bought shoes, for you
or
Karen. What are you planning to wear? When were you planning to buy it?”

Karen said, “Hemi…” in a tone of the purest misery.

Violet heaved a sigh. “This isn’t going to end well. And I need to go. I have a business to run, and there’s no way Hope’s going to be ready to buy shoes in the next hour, or to let her sister do it, either.”

“I’ll do it,” Karen said, just as Hope said, “No.”

“See what I mean?” Violet said. “I’m going back to work. I have somebody’s wedding gown to oversee, if somebody else can pull his head out of his arse and make it happen. D’you want me to take Karen back with me?” She told the girl, “Fiona will show you around, or you could just read some more of your book. But this isn’t going to be quick.”

Karen glanced at her sister as if she wanted to say more, and Hope sighed, ran a hand through her mass of fine hair, mussing it, and said, “That’ll be better. Go on with Violet, please.”

“I’m going,” Karen said, “but
I
love Hemi, and
I
trust him.
I
don’t care if he was married before, and I don’t see why you do. He isn’t married now. Why isn’t that enough?”

“It’s like I’m in some alternate universe,” Hope said. “Or like it’s Backwards Day. I could explain it to you, but it’s more important right now that I explain it to Hemi. Please, sweetie. Go. I’m so mad and so disappointed, I can’t…I can’t think straight. I’m going to say things I’ll regret, and I’m…” She heaved in a breath. “I can’t—”

I couldn’t stop myself. I was still narky as hell, but if the winner was the one who needed it less—well, that wasn’t me. And she was so sad, and I couldn’t have that, so I stepped closer and put an arm around her. “Come sit down and talk to me,” I said. “Karen’s a grown girl. She knows you can get angry at the people you love.”

“I don’t, though,” Hope said, almost wonderingly. “I don’t do that. I’ve never…” I could see the tears pooling behind her eyelids, could see her battling with her anger, and I could have kicked myself.

“Never mind,” I said. “What was that you said? It starts with you listening to me, and me listening to you. Come sit down, and we’ll do it.”

Hope

How could I resist Hemi? When had I ever been able to?

Married,
I told myself,
until she wanted the baby.
And all the same, I was walking over to the couch in the corner and sitting down with him, and he was holding my hand as if he needed to do it.

When I had pain, I wanted him beside me. Even if he was the one causing the pain. How bad was that? And I thought he might feel the same way.

“There’s something wrong with us,” I said. “Something twisted.”

“No,” he said. “There isn’t.”

I knew it was more important to talk about his wife, except maybe it wasn’t. “You can’t just say that and make it true. The way we make love…” I kept my voice down. What a conversation to have in a crowded café, and yet here I was having it. “You like it because you can be in charge, and you hate not being in charge. In anything, and that’s where you can do it the most. You like the way I…the way I am, because I give that up to you. That’s even why you like that I’m small. I know it. And I like it because…because maybe I need to feel that, too. That I can give all the power to somebody else, that I don’t have to be in charge for a while, and I can surrender to all of my…my darker impulses and still be safe. I want somebody to take control of me, and I want to know that somebody wants me so desperately that he has to…to…”

“Has to tie you down,” Hemi finished for me, apparently having no difficulty at all saying this in a café. “So you can’t move, and you can’t get away, and he can do whatever he wants to you. Whatever
I
want to do to you, because it’s not ‘somebody.’ It’s me. You need to know that I need to hold you, and that I need to keep you, and that I’m going to do it. You need me to convince you that you belong to me, and to tell you hard enough that you can believe it, too.”

I swallowed, and he said, “Maybe that’s why, yeh. Because you need to feel needed and I need to be in control, out of some deep, dark reason in our pasts. And maybe we’re just wired that way. What does it matter why, if it feels good to both of us?”