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‘I’m over here because my aunt died,’ she told him. ‘Charles’s mother. I spent the last few days sitting by Aunt Hattie’s bedside. I haven’t seen Charles. Hattie is due to be buried tomorrow. Charles may or may not come to the funeral. He’s certainly not paying for it.’
‘So…’ He took a wild guess. ‘You’re not a close family?’
‘I’m a very close family,’ she told him, and took another mouthful of her flapjack. Difficult conversation or not, she wasn’t forgetting that she was truly enjoying this food. But her voice, when she spoke again, held more than a trace of bitterness. ‘I’m so close I’m practically glue,’ she added. ‘Good old Peta. She’ll do the right thing. The family thing. But not Charles.’
‘So why do you need to see him?’
She took a deep breath. She seemed to brace herself. Her fork was set down and her chin tilted in a gesture he was starting to recognise.
‘Aunt Hattie and my father owned half our family farm each,’ she told him. ‘My father left us his half when he died ten years back, and the agreement was always that Hattie would do the same. She hasn’t. She’s left her half to Charles. So I need him…’ Her voice faltered then, as if accepting the sheer impossibility of what she was about to suggest. ‘I need him to agree not to sell it. To let me farm it until…until I’m free.’
‘Free?’
She looked up at him and her eyes were blind with a pain he couldn’t begin to understand. ‘The farm is all I have,’ she told him. ‘It can’t mean anything to Charles. It’s just money. He must see that to do anything but let me live there would be desperately unfair.’ She bit her lip and then picked up her soda, trying desperately to move past a pain that seemed well nigh unbearable. ‘But that’s nothing to do with you. Charles is my cousin. My problem. You’ve given me a feed. Now I’ll clean myself as best I can, go back and try to face him one more time—and if I can’t I’ll go home. But at least I’ll have tried.’
He couldn’t bear it. The look of pain. The defiance. David and Goliath, and Goliath was Charles Higgins… She had to let him take the next step with her. ‘You can’t face him alone,’ he told her.
‘Of course I can.’
‘There’s no of course about it,’ he growled. ‘Charles is a slime-ball. Maybe he’s different with family but he’s still a slime-ball. Okay, I might be off the track with my offer of three-thousand-dollar suits but my instincts are right. We’ll get you something neat to wear and I’m coming in with you. I might not get you more than an interview but I can get you that.’
‘How?’
‘For a start, I own the building he rents office space in.’
She stared. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not. Regrettably. I’ve already decided not to renew his lease when it expires but he doesn’t know that. I can apply pressure.’
‘But…’
‘Finish your soda,’ he told her, aware at the back of his mind of his total amazement that he was doing this. That he was getting more and more involved. ‘We mustn’t keep Charles waiting now, must we?’
They did the dress thing again, but this time Marcus had the sense to keep it simple. They headed to a moderately priced department store and Marcus stood back while Peta chose a neat skirt and blouse and strappy sandals. She looked great, Marcus decided, and then wondered: Why do women wear three-thousand-dollar suits when they can look just as good in far cheaper clothes?
But maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe Peta wasn’t any woman. She’d look great in anything, he thought, as Robert drove them back to Higgins’s office.
The only problem was that she was a bit pale. Her hands were clenched so tightly that he could see the white in her knuckles. But she was still determinedly keeping up conversation as they made their way past Central Park.
‘It’s Central Park I most wanted to see,’ she told him. ‘Ever since I was a little girl I dreamed of riding around Central Park.’
‘You’re a country girl?’
‘I told you—we live on a farm. I milk cows for a living.’
We? Who?
It didn’t matter. Did it?
She was expecting a courteous, impersonal reply. He had to fight to find one. Somehow. ‘So…you live on a farm yet you dream of coming to New York to ride a horse?’
‘It’s a different kind of riding.’ She gave a hesitant smile and he saw that her hands were still clenched. He had to fight back the urge to lift them—to forcibly unclench them. ‘John Lennon loved this park,’ she was saying. ‘Jackie Kennedy loved this park. All these people that I’ve only read about.’
‘You admired Jackie O?’
‘The lady had class.’
‘And John Lennon?’
‘Oooh, those glasses were sexy.’
‘Really?’ he said faintly and was rewarded by a chuckle. Her hands, he noticed with satisfaction, were finally starting to relax. ‘So who else do you think of as sexy?’ he asked. ‘Just John? Paul? George? How about Ringo?’
‘Ringo was sexy,’ she agreed. ‘Really sexy. When I see the old clips I think he’s cuteness personified. But now every time I hear him I think of Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a bit disconcerting.’
‘I imagine it might be.’
She was so different. How had his day been hijacked? he wondered. How had this happened? Instead of making plans and signing million-dollar deals, he was discussing the sexiness of Thomas the Tank Engine.
And enjoying it.
But then they were pulling up outside the offices where Charles presumably lay waiting, and her hands clenched white again.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Marcus told her and he surprised himself by placing a hand over her much smaller one. The touch surprised them both. It was as if a frisson of electricity ran between them, warm, intimate and somehow immeasurably comforting. ‘I’m right behind you,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Every step of the way.’
Miss Pritchard—alias Attila the Hun, Charles’s secretary—was her normal appalling self. Peta stepped out of the lift and she saw her coming and sighed. She didn’t even pretend to be courteous.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m here for my appointment,’ Peta said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘It was for ten this morning.’
‘Mr Higgins had a moment free at two,’ the woman said, her disdain obvious in her intonation. ‘But you weren’t here. He has no more appointments available until late next week.’
‘Then could you ask Mr Higgins if he’ll make an appointment free for me,’ Marcus said, his lazy drawl making the woman’s face jerk from Peta to the man following behind. The man who, until now, had stood in the background and had not been noticed. Marcus. ‘I believe the lease for this office space is soon up for renegotiation,’ Marcus drawled. ‘As landlord I expect a certain professional standard of my tenants. Peta had an appointment at ten this morning and she’s still waiting. To have disgruntled clients hanging around my office space is not what I wish in my buildings.’
He motioned to a chair. ‘Peta, if you’d like to sit down…’ He gave the secretary a glimmer of a mockery of his smile—the sort of smile that had made many a business opponent come close to bursting a blood vessel in entirely appropriate anxiety. ‘We’ll wait,’ he told the woman. ‘Tell Mr Higgins that we’re here and we’ll wait for as long as it takes.’
Attila’s eyes had been flat and cold before. Now, suddenly, they looked like those of a goldfish. A goldfish that was swimming over an unplugged hole. There were very few people in this city who weren’t aware of Marcus’s power. It was legendary. ‘But…’
‘Just tell him,’ Marcus said wearily. ‘I’d like to get this over quickly. I hope Mr Higgins feels the same.’
It appeared Mr Higgins did. Five minutes later they were ushered apologetically into the great man’s presence.
To say Peta was tense was an understatement. This interview was overwhelmingly important to her, Marcus thought. The look on her face as she walked into Charles’s office said she intended to be calm, practical and efficient.
She obviously hadn’t counted on the store of anger that must have been walled up for so long that the moment she saw her cousin it could do nothing but burst.
Charles was seated behind a vast mahogany desk. Before he could stand, Peta had stalked across and slammed her hands palm downward on the gleaming surface, so hard she made the in-tray jump.
‘You uncaring toad,’ she spat, and Marcus blinked in astonishment. But Peta was obviously past caring.
‘You brought Hattie over here and she came because she thought you loved her. She hoped you loved her. But you didn’t. You abandoned her.’ Peta’s voice was loaded with contempt and with icy rage. ‘She could have died at home. With me. With Harry. With people who loved her. But you told her you wanted her here. You conned her into coming where she knew no one. How could you?’
‘My relationship with my mother has nothing to do with you,’ Charles snapped. The man was in his late thirties, florid, wearing a three-piece suit that was as sleazy as it was expensive, and he was obviously deeply disdainful of the woman before him. ‘I have no idea what you want from me, Peta, or why you’ve bothered with this appointment.’ He cast an uneasy glance at Marcus and then looked back at Peta. It was apparent that Marcus was the only reason he’d agreed to see her—the only reason he didn’t get up now and push her out the door. ‘Or how you’ve dragged Mr Benson into this.’
‘No one drags me anywhere,’ Marcus said softly. He hauled up a chair and sat, with the air of a man who was here for the entertainment.
‘This is family business,’ Charles told him, and Marcus gave him his very nicest smile.
‘Consider me Peta’s family. I’ve just elected myself. Peta, I hate to mention it but I don’t think haranguing Charles on his mistreatment of his mother—justified as it may be—is going to achieve a lot. Let’s just cut to the chase and get out of here. This place makes me nervous.’
Charles flushed. ‘You don’t have to stay.’
‘I’m with the lady. Peta, say what you need to.’
Peta bit her lip. She half turned towards him and Marcus was waiting for her. He met her look and he sent her a silent message.
Settle. Anger’s not going to achieve anything. What’s important?
Peta caught it. She fought for control, taking a deep breath. Moving forward.
‘The will…’ she began.
‘Ah, yes.’ Charles had had time to do a regroup, too. ‘The will.’ With another nervous glance at Marcus, Charles settled deeper into his leather chair. His huge desk was guaranteed to intimidate the most influential of clients, and he clearly had no intention of moving from behind its protective distance. ‘What on earth do you have to say about my mother’s will?’
‘Hattie meant to leave her half of the farm to me.’
‘Not so, cousin.’ Charles even smirked.
Why do I want to hit him? Marcus thought, and he had to force himself to stay still. To stay an uninvolved bystander.
‘Hattie lived at the farm for all her life,’ Peta was saying. ‘We all have. Everyone except you. You left twenty years ago. But the farm paid for your education. For your travel.’ She gazed around the opulent office. ‘I bet it subsidised this. Your costs have already bled us dry. You’ve taken half our profits for ever. It’s crazy that she left her half of the farm to you.’
‘I’m her son.’
‘But we’ve subsidised you with so much already and she knew I can’t afford to buy you out. That it’d force me to sell.’
‘That’s not my problem.’
‘No.’ She took a deep breath, obviously forcing herself to stay calm. ‘No, it’s not. And it shouldn’t be. All I’m asking… All I’m asking is that you’ll hold on to your half of the farm—let me keep farming it—until Harry’s of age.’
‘Harry being…’ He almost sneered but then appeared to remember that Marcus was watching and turned it somehow into a vaguely supercilious smile. ‘Harry being how old?’
‘Twelve.’
Twelve. In the background Marcus frowned, absorbing the information. It didn’t fit—did it? Surely Peta wasn’t old enough to have a twelve-year-old son?
Maybe he should have asked more questions.
‘We need to stay on the farm until Harry’s eighteen,’ Peta was saying, almost pleading. ‘Charles, you know how important the farm is to us all.’
‘It was never important to me.’
‘It paid for your education. It let you be what you wanted and I want Harry to have that choice, too. And it’s a really good investment,’ she told him. ‘I’m more than happy for you to keep taking half the profits, and the land is growing more valuable all the time.’
‘I’ve checked,’ he told her. ‘It’d sell for a fortune now. Because it’s near the sea it can be cut up into hobby farm allotments. You own half. We both stand to make a killing.’
‘We love the farm.’
‘Get over it. I’m selling.’
‘Charles—’
‘Look, if that’s all you have to say…’ He eyed Marcus with disquiet, obviously still wondering how on earth Marcus came to be involved. ‘You’re wasting my time.’
Peta swallowed. Her hands clenched and unclenched. But, looking on, Marcus saw the moment she realised the futility of pleading. He saw her shoulders sag.
He saw her accept defeat.
And it hurt. It hurt him as well as the girl he was watching. Why did he want to hit someone? Not just someone. Charles. The urge was almost overwhelming.
But Peta had moved on. To the next important thing. ‘Will you come to Hattie’s funeral tomorrow?’ she whispered.
‘Funerals aren’t my scene.’
‘Hattie was your mother.’
‘Yeah.’ Another sneer. ‘And she’s dead. I’m over it, just like you should be. And, as soon as the funeral’s over, the farm’s on the market. It’d be on the market today if it wasn’t for that clause.’
‘Clause?’ Marcus queried.
This was the sort of negotiation he was good at. He’d learned from long practice that it was better not to jump in early—to simply sit back, listen and absorb. Focus on essentials. And probe everything.
Charles flashed him an annoyed glance. ‘My mother put a stupid codicil in her will. I left before the lawyer finished, and she did it…’
‘Tell me about it,’ Marcus said gently and Charles glowered.
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘If I’m married then I inherit,’ Peta said, obviously distressed. ‘It makes no sense. Just before Hattie left to come here, I went out with one of the local farmers. Twice. It was enough to make Hattie think about me getting married. As if I could. But she thought… Well, she worried about me, my Auntie Hattie. She thought I’d spend my life caring for the family and not myself. So she must have thought she’d push. By putting in a stupid clause at the end. If I’m married then I’ll inherit. But it’s not an option.’
‘What—never?’
‘In a week?’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Hattie… Well, she was terminally ill. She was a bit muddled, even before she left Australia. That was probably how Charles persuaded her to come. She’d have worried about me, but she was here in New York, alone, and Charles would have pushed her hard to leave him the farm. So she wrote a will leaving everything to Charles, but apparently, after Charles left her alone with the lawyer, she added a codicil. The codicil says if I’m married within a week of her dying then the farm reverts to me. But… A week? Maybe she meant a year. Maybe… Well, who knows what she meant, but she said a week. That’s by Wednesday.’ She turned to her cousin again, her eyes dulled with the knowledge of what he would say. She already knew.
‘Charles, please.’
