Soliman, Wendy - The Name of the Game (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (9 page)

“All right,” she said. “I’m still listening.”

“As you know, the company was established by my grandfather and his brother before the war.” Ashley nodded. “Upon my grandfather’s death, his fifty percent share in the company was left to my father. My great uncle’s fifty percent was split equally between his two sons. Charlie’s parents were killed in a car crash when he was eight, and his father’s twenty-five percent was held in trust for him until he was twenty-one.

“Now, this is where it gets complicated.” He smiled at her, but his focus was distant, his mind clearly dwelling somewhere in the past. “My Uncle Peter, our accountant, kept his twenty-five percent intact. What you may not know is that he was a bit of a lady’s man in his day. His first marriage ended in divorce, and his wife named Eve’s mother, Stephanie, when she sued for that divorce on the grounds of adultery. Eve was Stephanie’s daughter from a previous marriage. Anyway, to cut a long story short, when his marriage to Stephanie came to an end, Stephanie wisely asked for shares in the company as part of her settlement. When Eve and I married, Stephanie passed the five percent she’d managed to obtain on to her daughter as a wedding present.”

Ashley listened in rapt silence. She’d known that Eve was a nominal director of the company, but she didn’t play any active part in its running.

“In the true manner of a woman scorned, Stephanie violently detested and bitterly resented Peter and hoped, by passing those shares to Eve, to exact further revenge by giving me extra power within the company.”

“I didn’t realize that there was a power struggle between you. I know you and Charlie don’t always see eye to eye, but I thought you still got along okay.”

Matt harrumphed. “Not exactly.”

“You hide it well.”

“Years of practise.” He smiled at her and took a long sip of wine. “When my father died, I received forty percent of his shares. The other ten percent went to my mother for the residue of her life, at the end of which they revert to me. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with a bit of an impasse. I have forty percent plus my mother’s voting rights, giving me exactly fifty percent. Peter has his twenty and Charlie twenty-five, and so—”

“And so Eve’s five percent represents the balance of power.”

“Exactly. It’s vitally important to any decisions about the company’s future, and everyone knows it.” Matt grimaced. “Especially Eve. Charlie’s very gung-ho and wants to push ahead with expansion plans on our own. I don’t think we’re in a strong enough position to do that, but that’s not what he wants to hear.”

“Can’t you get Peter to side with you?”

“No, I gave up on that long ago. Peter doesn’t want anything to change.”

“But it has to.” Ashley wrinkled her brow. “We can do so much better if we amalgamate with another local company and combine the business on our respective books. Surely he can see that?”

“Afraid not. He’s still stuck in the past, but if there has to be change, then he’ll do whatever Charlie suggests, simply because he associates me, though Eve, with Stephanie.” Matt expelled a long breath. “There’s always been competition between Charlie and me.” Matt shrugged. “If I said black was white, then Charlie would disagree on principle.”

“I can see your difficulties with family squabbles over the company but don’t understand about the baby. If you haven’t slept with Eve, then whose is it?”

“I’m getting to that. But first you need to understand a bit more about my relationship with Charlie.”

Ashley glanced at his features, twisted with bitterness, and realized how much it was costing him to reveal the sordid details of the family’s soft underbelly, even to her.

“You don’t have to tell me, Matt,” she said softly.

“Yeah, I do. It’s relevant.” He drained his glass, refilled both, and strode about the room, presumably to assemble his thoughts. “When his parents died, Charlie came to live with us. I was ten at the time, and he was eight. My mother had had several miscarriages after she had me and eventually accepted that she wouldn’t have any more children. And so being “gifted” another son was a dream come true for her. And for me. The strain of being an only child in a family where I was expected by my father to excel at absolutely everything I did was already beginning to tell. I welcomed Charlie with open arms, and at first we got along fine. Charlie joined me at Winchester, where I was already a boarder—”

“Where your boys are now?”

“Yes, but that’s when I started to realize just what a competitive streak Charlie possesses. He wanted to beat everyone at everything, both academically and, where he excelled most, on the sports field. The trouble was, although he had a good brain, he was too lazy to use it and resorted to cheating so that his results always trumped mine. I did well academically, through sheer hard work, but Charlie did better by using his wits to beat the system.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” Ashley said, a wry twist to her lips.

“As the years went on, that’s all that seemed to matter to him. It was a compulsion that I never understood. I’d never been unpleasant to him, helped him to settle at school, and tried to be his friend.” Matt sighed. “It was a long time before I realized it was my father he was trying to impress, and to do that, he felt the need to trump everything I did.”

Ashley was totally fascinated by what Matt’s account. “What compelled him?” she asked. “Why did it matter to him so much?”

“I never found that out. I guess it’s just the way he was. And still is.”

“Go on,” she said when Matt paused for a little too long.

“When it came to university time, I managed to win a place at Oxbridge to read Law. Charlie was unable to cheat with his A-level exams, the system had been tightened up by then, and his grades weren’t good enough to get him into a decent college. Instead, he went straight into the business, doing what he does best, using his charm to get new business on the books. I was happy for him because it took the pressure off me. I knew my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps, and we’d disagreed about it. I wanted to be a barrister, you see.”

Ashley, chin propped in her hand, offered him the ghost of a smile. “Then why didn’t you do that?”

“I was in my final year at Oxford, doing well. My father was delighted about that and kept banging on about it. I subsequently discovered that it drove Charlie demented. I’ve often thought that was the real start of the rift between us.”

Ashley blew air through her lips. “It’s too ridiculous for words.”

“Yes, but that was just the start of it. It got a damned sight worse when Peter married Stephanie and Eve burst on the scene.” Matt stared off into the distance. “She was just sixteen and the most beautiful thing either of us had ever seen. Charlie was instantly smitten, I could tell that much because I was, too. Young as she was, Eve knew the power her looks afforded her, even then. She went out with us separately, and together, forcing us to be civil to one another.”

“Playing you off against each other?”

“Yes, she enjoyed the power she wielded over us, I can see that now. Anyway, it went on for over a year. Charlie had her to himself whilst I was at college, but as soon as I came home for the holidays she latched on to me. In retrospect, that was the worst possible thing she could have done from Charlie’s perspective. I know he begged her to marry him, but she wouldn’t give him an answer. I thought she was being unnecessarily cruel, started to see through her, and backed off a bit. I was dating other girls at college and didn’t want to get tied down. She obviously sensed that I was losing interest, which only made her more determined to get her claws into me.”

“Charming!”

“Not quite the word I’d use.” Matt offered her a tender smile. “Still, my approach is the one Charlie should have taken. I tried to tell him that, but he wasn’t about to take advice from me. The more she backed off, the more he pursued her.”

“I’ll bet she just loved that.”

“Oh, she lapped it up,” Matt said, rolling his eyes. “One evening we’d been to a concert and a party afterward. When I took her home, neither of us was exactly sober. Her mum and Peter were out, and well, one thing led to another, and the next thing I know, she’s telling me she’s carrying my baby.”

Ashley’s soft heart went out to him. “Oh, Matt, what a thing for her to have done.”

“Well, it takes two, and I wasn’t about to shirk my responsibilities. Looking back on it, I think it was a deliberate ploy to trap me. She told me she was on the pill, you see, and I didn’t query it. I mean,” he said, lifting his shoulder, “why would she lie about it? Anyway, I did the right thing and married her.”

He looked so forlorn that Ashley wanted to get up and hug him. Instead, she clasped her hands together and hardened her heart. Eve was conniving, but Matt had yet to convince her that the baby really wasn’t his.

“It was the first time that I actually felt sorry for Charlie,” he said. “He genuinely loved her, I knew that, and once again I’d usurped him. What’s more, he was forced to act as my best man, which really must have rubbed salt into the wound. My father expected it of him, and he wasn’t about to do anything to upset his relationship with the old man.”

“What happened after that? Did you go back to college?”

“Initially. Jack was born, and at first, Eve played the part of the devoted mother. But, as with everything she does, the novelty soon wore off. We were living in a tiny flat, I was studying all the hours God sent for finals, working part-time jobs to bring in the bacon, and sleeping no more than four hours a night. Then Eve got ‘ill,’ and I found myself changing nappies and getting up at night to feed the baby because she was too unwell to cope.”

“That should have told you something.”

“Yeah, it probably should have. I guess I was just too tired to piece it all together. I just lived for one day at a time.” He sat down, then stood again, too agitated to settle. “Six months after Jack was born, my father had his first stroke, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to be able to carry on with the company until he recovered. Charlie thought his day had come, but my father was adamant that he wanted me to take over.”

“But what about your studies?” Ashley could hear the indignation in her own voice. “You wanted to be a barrister. You’d worked so hard.”

“Yes, but we were all on emotional overload, especially my mother. She begged me not to upset Dad when he was so ill. It would only be a temporary measure, and when Dad recovered, I’d be able to finish my degree and go my own may.” Matt shrugged. “What choice did I have? Philip Roker worked there, so did Charlie. They both knew the business backward, so they didn’t really need me. I’d just stay for a few months to put Dad’s mind at rest. At least the salary meant that we could move somewhere better and get help with the baby. I worried about him, left all day in Eve’s unpredictable care, and felt a lot better once we had a reliable au pair. It was the final nail in the coffin as far as my relationship with Charlie went, though. He was full of anger and resentment, even though I tried to convince him that I didn’t plan to stay with the company for long.”

“You’d taken the woman he loved
and
the job he wanted.”

“That’s the way he saw it.” Matt sat down again. “Eve remained close friends with Charlie, knowing he’d do anything she asked of him. Looking back, I suspect she ran to him all the time with tales of my neglect. You see, Eve was never happy unless she was the centre of attention, but I rapidly ran out of patience with her when she started to neglect our home and baby.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She said she was too young for motherhood, that I was always working and she never got to have any fun.”

Ashley opened her mouth to say what she thought about that, remembered that Eve was still Matt’s wife, and closed it again.

“It’s okay,” he said, offering her a lilting smile. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right.”

“So why did you stay?”

“For Jack’s sake, at first, anyway. Then, about two years into our marriage, I came across her at a party in an intimate clinch with Charlie. I seriously thought about leaving. Dad wouldn’t have liked it—”