Читать книгу Surrender to the Past - Кэрол Мортимер, Carole Mortimer - Страница 7

‘I THOUGHT you were in a hurry to get back to work?’

Mia hadn’t even realised she was being followed as she hurried into the park at the end of the street, but she now came to an abrupt halt on the gravel pathway, eyes closing tightly, shoulders stiff, her jaw clenched, hands fisted at her sides, as Ethan spoke softly from just behind her.

All those years of silence. Of peace. And now she was being hounded by one of the very people she had so desperately needed to get away from. To the extent that Mia knew she would never be able to come to this park again without recalling Ethan’s presence here, too.

‘Mia …?’

She drew in a deeply controlling breath, smoothing her expression into one of mild uninterest before slowly turning to face Ethan.

‘I could add harassment to that list of charges.’ She eyed him defiantly.

To Ethan she had looked so very different inside the coffee shop. Not only looked different but acted differently too—like a distant stranger. But he could see traces of the old Mia in her now—in the depths of her eyes, the soft curve of her mouth, and the vulnerable tilt of her chin.

‘I’m sure the police would have no interest in a stepbrother visiting his long-lost stepsister.’ Ethan knew before he had finished speaking that it had been the wrong thing to say. Her eyes chilled over with obvious distaste at that connection between the two of them.

‘You aren’t my stepbrother, Ethan, because I disowned what was left of my family before your mother married my father four and a half years ago! And I wasn’t lost—I just didn’t want to be found. I still don’t,’ she added flatly.

‘Too late!’

‘Obviously.’ She continued to eye him coldly.

Ethan knew that it was going to be up to him to stop baiting her in this way if this wasn’t to develop into nothing more than a slanging match. Mia’s resentment about the past was still such that it wasn’t just going to evaporate during the course of one conversation. One conversation badly handled on his part, he acknowledged heavily.

He had been thrown slightly off-balance earlier, when he’d walked into the coffee shop and recognised Mia sitting in a booth at the back of the room reading a magazine. A Mia so changed, but at the same time so confident in the world she had created for herself, that for one heart-stopping moment Ethan had almost hesitated about disturbing her obvious contentment. Almost …

He gave a grimace. ‘Could we start again, do you think …?’

‘Where would you like to start from?’ Her eyes glittered like emeralds in the pallor of her face. ‘Perhaps when I first became a sixth-form pupil at the boarding school of which your widowed mother was headmistress? Or after your mother’s affair with my father, perhaps? Or when you conveniently got a job working for Burton Industries—my father’s firm—once you’d left LSE with your first-class master’s degree and a PhD? With hindsight you have to have realised the significance of that …?’

‘The possibility I was only employed at Burton Industries because of my mother’s … connection to your father?’ Ethan drawled dryly. ‘It crossed my mind, of course—’

‘I’m sure it did!’

‘And was as quickly dismissed,’ he bit out harshly. ‘I’m going to say this only once more, Mia—my mother wasn’t involved with your father before you went to Southlands School. Nor did their later friendship have anything to do with my getting a job at Burton Industries.’

She smiled humourlessly. ‘And “once more” I’m going to choose not to believe you!’

‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘Perhaps because to you at least I was always so predictable!’

He gave an impatient sigh. ‘I was head-hunted by dozens of companies when I left university, Mia. Burton Industries were lucky to have me.’

They probably were, Mia conceded grudgingly; Ethan’s qualifications had never been in question. Or his ambition. It was only the lengths he was willing to go to in order to achieve those ambitions that had become so glaringly questionable. Lengths which involved the once innocent and naively trusting Mia.

She had wondered five years ago—at the same time as she’d thanked her good fortune!—how she had ever been lucky enough to attract the attention of someone like Ethan Black. The epitome of tall, dark and handsome, he could—and usually did—have any woman that he wanted. Mia may have been the only daughter of multi-millionaire William Burton and beautiful socialite Kay, but beneath the fashionable designer-label clothes her mother had insisted on buying for her Mia had also been terribly shy, and merely pretty rather than beautiful, like the women Ethan was usually attracted to.

Once she’d learned of Ethan’s mother’s affair with her father, the reason for Ethan’s attraction had become obvious: Grace had made a play for the father, Ethan the daughter. One of them was sure to succeed.

‘And let’s call our parents’ past relationship the nasty little affair that it really was, shall we?’ Mia’s top lip turned back with distaste.

‘I told you it wasn’t like that—’

‘I’m really not interested, Ethan.’

‘No—because you prefer to twist events to suit your own warped take on what really happened five years ago.’

‘Nothing of what I eventually learnt about that situation suited me, Ethan,’ Mia assured him furiously. ‘Certainly not the realization that the only reason my father had chosen that particular boarding school to send me to in the first place was so that he had an excuse to visit his mistress. That’s quite a play on words, don’t you think? My headmistress was also my father’s mistress—’

‘Stop it, Mia!’ Ethan reached out to grasp the tops of her arms and shake her. ‘Just stop it!’

‘Let go of me, Ethan,’ Mia gasped. ‘You’re hurting me!’

His fingers tightened rather than relaxed, her leather jacket proving no barrier to the pain of his fingers biting into her arms.

‘I’m hurting you?’ He thrust her firmly away from him, his gaze raking over her mercilessly. ‘Do you have any idea—any idea at all—of the heartache you caused your father—have continued to cause him—by just disappearing in that way five years ago?’

‘But I’m sure my leaving didn’t affect you in the same way—did it, Ethan?’ she murmured scornfully.

‘Would you believe me if I were to say yes?’

‘No.’

His mouth tightened.

‘God, I was such an innocent. Such a fool!’ She gave a pained groan.

‘Because you were attracted to me?’

‘Because I was stupid enough to think that you were attracted to me!’

He frowned darkly. ‘I was attracted to you—’

‘Oh, please, Ethan.’ Mia gave a fierce shake of her head. ‘What you were attracted to was my father’s bank account and Burton Industries. You and your mother, both!’

‘I should be careful what you say next, Mia …’ Ethan’s tone was icy with warning.

A warning Mia had absolutely no interest in. ‘At least I had the good sense to get out. Whereas my father—’

‘I said stop, Mia.’

‘It’s really not important now anyway.’ She gave an uninterested

shrug. ‘Five years later you both appear to be exactly where you always wanted to be—your mother is married to my father and you’re running Burton Industries!’

Ethan’s face looked as if it had been carved out of stone. ‘You really do believe that’s all I wanted all along?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mia assured him with feeling. ‘You’ve always done exactly what was in the best interests of Ethan Black! And—to set the record straight—I didn’t disappear five years ago. I left.’

‘You disappeared, damn it!’ Ethan grimaced. ‘Just dropped out part-way through your second year of university, dropped me, and left!’

‘I was twenty years old. And, unless I’m mistaken, in this country that’s classed as being an adult, capable of making your own decisions. Besides, I left my father a note—’

‘“Don’t bother looking for me because you won’t find me.”’ Ethan quoted disgustedly. ‘What the hell sort of letter is that to leave anyone—least of all the man who had loved and cared for you since the day you were born?’

Mia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Even that was more than he deserved!’

‘More than he deserved …?’ he repeated softly.

‘Yes!’ She didn’t at all care for the revulsion she could read in Ethan’s expression. ‘And I only left him that much so he wouldn’t decide to report me as missing to the police!’

‘And what about me, Mia? What did I deserve? The two of us were dating, sleeping together, when you decided to pull that disappearing act!’

‘It was the boss’s daughter you were sleeping with, Ethan. Not me,’ she dismissed scathingly.

‘That isn’t true.’ Ethan frowned.

‘Whether it’s true or not is unimportant—now as well as then. Just knowing of your connection to the woman who helped to make a fool of my mother was—and still is—enough reason for me never to want to see or hear from you ever again,’ Mia stated flatly.

Ethan drew in a ragged breath. ‘Okay, let’s forget about our own relationship if it makes you happy—’

‘Oh, it does!’

‘But William is your father—’

‘Something—along with you and your mother—I’ve been trying to forget for the past five years!’ She turned her back on him to walk away, and sat down on a wooden bench looking out over the parkland. She was hoping that Ethan wouldn’t follow her, but was not altogether surprised when, after a few seconds’ hesitation, he walked that same short distance and sat on the other end of the bench.

The two of them sat in uneasy silence for several long minutes.

‘He didn’t report you missing but he—we certainly looked for you.’ Ethan finally broke that silence, his voice huskily soft.

‘Don’t bother with the “we”, Ethan,’ she cut in dryly. ‘My father may have been too lovestruck by your mother to have realised it, but I certainly know that it wasn’t in your best interests for me to be found.’

‘Another piece of your own unique logic?’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Once I had been removed from the equation it allowed both you and your mother to move in on my father.’

‘Damn you—’

‘No doubt,’ Mia accepted ruefully.

‘Okay, I can see there’s no reasoning with you on the subject of my mother or me—but what about your father?’

‘What about him?’

‘How could you just turn your back on him in that way?’ Ethan gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘William searched for you for months. Years! No lead was too small for him to follow up. No possible sighting of you too ridiculous for him to investigate.’

Mia didn’t so much as glance at him. ‘And to think that I never left London.’

‘You—?’ Ethan gave a disbelieving shake of his head. ‘You were here in the city all the time?’

‘Yes.’ She gave a humourless smile. ‘Don’t look so shocked,

Ethan; haven’t you heard that the best way to avoid detection by the enemy is by staying right under his nose!’

‘None of us were ever your enemy.’

‘No?’

‘No!’ Ethan eyed her in frustration. ‘Damn it!’ He began to pace. ‘So where exactly were you in London?’

Mia’s cheeks warmed at his obvious disgust. ‘I stayed with friends for the first couple of months.’

‘We—William contacted all of your friends to see if any of them had seen or heard from you and they all said they hadn’t!’

She raised her brows. ‘They were my friends, Ethan, not his.’

‘With friends like that …!’ His jaw tightened. ‘Where did you go after you left these so-called friends?’

‘I bought an apartment, took some classes, and then a couple of years ago I opened the coffee shop.’

‘What sort of classes? William checked every year with all the universities to see if you were attending any of them,’ he added with a frown.

‘I enrolled in a very reputable cookery school right here in London, Ethan,’ Mia announced with satisfaction.

‘Cookery school …? You actually bake the cookies in Coffee and Cookies yourself?’

She almost laughed at the disbelief in Ethan’s expression. Almost. But even knowing she had managed to totally bemuse the arrogant Ethan Black wasn’t enough reason for Mia to feel like laughing today. Nor was it reason enough to tell him that she not only baked cookies for her coffee shop but also for a couple of very upmarket specialist food stores in London …

‘My maternal grandmother, as well as leaving me the hefty trust fund that my father so conveniently signed over to me on my eighteenth birthday, also taught me to bake. I’m good at it,’ she added defensively as Ethan just continued to stare at her.

‘I’m sure that you are.’ Ethan finally nodded slowly. ‘But it’s a drastic change from the economics you were studying before you dropped out.’

She grimaced. ‘That was always my father’s choice, not mine.’

‘Because he expected you to take over Burton Industries one day?’

‘Probably,’ Mia acknowledged. ‘How lucky for him that you came along so conveniently to fill the breach.’

Ethan drew in a hissing breath. ‘Bitter and twisted doesn’t suit you, Mia.’

Her eyes flashed a deep dark green. ‘This is me being a realist, Ethan, not bitter and twisted.’

‘You closed your bank account two days after you left. We all thought you must have gone abroad somewhere.’

Mia gave another shrug. ‘Because that’s what you were all supposed to believe.’

‘That was unbelievably cruel, Mia.’

Her eyes glittered. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

‘Oh, believe me, I’m learning fast,’ Ethan assured her grimly.

Mia fell silent, not looking at Ethan but at the people in the park—some walking their dogs, others taking their children home from school. All such everyday occurrences, sights and people Mia saw every day whenever she came to the park to eat her lunch, and yet Ethan’s presence here made this totally unlike a normal day for her …

She turned to look at him where he sat on the other end of the bench, her heart tightening in her chest at the bleakness of his expression as he stared straight back at her.

He was more attractive than he had ever been, Mia grudgingly admitted. Those outward signs of maturity gave him a dangerous edge and that aura of arrogant self-confidence only added to the impression of danger.

Her chin rose. ‘I forgot to congratulate you earlier. On your promotion,’ she explained at Ethan’s questioning glance. ‘It was announced in the newspapers several months ago that you were made CEO of Burton Industries.’

He looked at her through narrowed lids. ‘And did you also see in the newspapers the circumstances under which I became CEO of the company?’

Mia turned away from that piercing silver gaze. ‘Because my father had a heart attack.’

‘You knew William had been ill?’ Ethan stared at her incredulously.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed flatly.

‘And yet you still didn’t go to see him?’ Ethan made no effort to hide his disgust now. Mia had known—all the time she had known about William’s heart attack—and she hadn’t even bothered to telephone her father, let alone go to see him …

Her sighed heavily. ‘Obviously not.’

‘What if he had died, Mia, and you never saw him again?’

Mia tried not to shudder at the thought. As much as her father had hurt her badly, she still questioned whether she had done the right thing. But Ethan didn’t need to know that, so she shrugged. ‘I have no intention of ever seeing him again.’

‘And what if I were to tell you that it was another erroneous sighting of you that caused his heart attack?’

‘It’s been five years, Ethan—don’t try and lay that guilt trip on me!’

‘Five years or fifty—your father will never stop loving you. Never stop looking for you!’

Her expression remained unrelenting. ‘I’m not, nor have I ever been—obviously!—answerable for anything my father may or may not choose to do.’

Ethan looked at her for several long, tense seconds before standing up abruptly. ‘I’m wasting my time even trying to talk to you, aren’t I?’ It was more a flat statement than a question.

‘I’m glad you’ve finally realised that.’ Mia looked up at him unemotionally.

He gave a shake of his head. ‘Obviously the changes in you aren’t just on the surface, but go all the way to your selfish and bitter little heart!’

‘How dare you …?’ Mia gasped.

Ethan looked down at her as if he had never seen her before. ‘You were so beautiful, so sweet and trusting—’

‘Well, I certainly had that knocked out of me, didn’t I?’ She eyed him wearily.

‘Are you referring to me or to your father now?’

‘Both!’

‘Forget about me—’

‘Oh, let’s!’

Ethan gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘William did everything for you. Loved you. Damn it, he adored you—’

‘And then he betrayed everything I believed about him by having an affair with your mother!’ Mia finished heatedly as she stood up to face him. ‘And just because the two of them finally married each other it doesn’t make your mother any more my stepmother than it makes you my stepbrother! None of those things changes the fact that long before my mother died my father was involved in an affair with your own mother.’

‘It wasn’t like that. You make it sound so—’

‘Sordid?’ she suggested. ‘Maybe that’s because it was sordid. My mother was in a wheelchair for the last four years of her life, and all the time my father and your mother—’

‘I’ve told you—it wasn’t all the time.’ His eyes glittered. ‘They didn’t even know each other until after you started attending Southlands School.’

Mia gave an inelegant snort. ‘You really expect me to believe that?’

‘I’m telling you how it was—’

‘And beware anyone who dares to disbelieve the arrogant and powerful Ethan Black?’ She eyed him mockingly.

‘This isn’t about me, Mia. And it isn’t about you, either,’ he added grimly, cutting her off as she was about to speak. ‘Yes, your father and my mother made the mistake of falling in love with each other while your father was still married, but they didn’t do anything about those feelings until after your mother died. I know you would rather believe otherwise, but—’

‘My God, I can’t believe you actually fell for any of that sanctimonious rubbish they spouted after my mother died.’ She looked at him with pity. ‘That whole story of how the two of them fell in love but fought against their feelings! I always gave you credit for having more intelligence than to believe something so lame, Ethan.’

He eyed her derisively. ‘From what I’ve observed of the emotion, intelligence has very little to do with falling in love.’

‘The two of them were together on the day my mother killed herself, Ethan,’ she continued fiercely. ‘They were together at your mother’s house while my mother sat at home and downed a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of wine!’

He winced. ‘Your mother didn’t even know about their friendship.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’ Mia scorned. ‘She didn’t so much as leave a note, so how can anyone know what my mother was thinking when she swallowed that bottle of pills?’

Ethan hesitated, thinking of the promise William had extracted from both himself and his mother never to tell Mia of the real circumstances behind her mother’s death, or the letter Kay had left for him. It was a promise they had both kept for the past five years. But at what price …?

He bit back his frustration. ‘I’m sorry your mother did what she did, but you have to believe that it had nothing to do with the friendship that existed between my mother and your father.’

‘I don’t have to believe anything, Ethan.’ Her face had paled to a ghostly white.

Damn it, Ethan hadn’t come here to hurt Mia. Just like William, Ethan had never wanted to do that. ‘Mia, I know how you must have felt—still feel—’

‘You don’t know anything about me, Ethan!’ Mia shook her head. ‘Certainly not how I felt then. Or how I still and will always feel about the circumstances of my mother’s death.’

‘Maybe that’s because you refused all my attempts to see you after she died?’ Ethan reminded her harshly.

Of course Mia had refused to see Ethan again after her mother had died and her father’s affair with Ethan’s mother had made front-page headlines in every newspaper in the country. How could she have done anything else, behaved in any other way, when the knowledge of that affair had shown her all too clearly the unfolding of past events and the reasons for them? All of them. Including the reason for her own brief relationship with Ethan.

‘We had nothing left to say to each other, Ethan. You were just using me. Just—’ Mia broke off abruptly as she heard her the emotional break in her voice.

She would not do this! She didn’t care what Ethan thought of her now, what he accused her of—or how hurtful she found those accusations—she would not allow herself to be put through this emotional wringer a second time.

The worst part of it was that she had loved her father so much—worshipped him, almost. She had liked Grace Black too, for the two years she’d been a pupil at her school. Until she’d later found out about the affair.

As for her feelings for Ethan …!

She had worshipped him from afar for years too—already been crazily in love with him when he’d asked her out for the first time. She would have done anything—been anything that he wanted her to be. And all the time—all the time his mother had been involved in a relationship with Mia’s father.

She dropped down abruptly onto the bench, her face averted. ‘You’re right, Ethan. We’re done here.’

Ethan looked at the sharpness of her profile: pale and hollow cheeks, haunted eyes, the slenderness of her body poised as if for a fight.

He knew how much the past had hurt Mia. How much his own connection with the woman her father loved had and still did hurt her. But she would not believe—how could she, when she refused to believe everything else he told her?—how hurt and upset he had been about that friendship too, until William and his mother had explained the truth of the situation to him.

A truth that William had refused absolutely ever to confide in the grieving Mia, insisting that he had no intention of trying to win back his daughter’s love at the cost of damaging Mia’s memory of the mother she had loved.

Ethan thrust his clenched hands into the pockets of his overcoat. ‘I take it you still know where the offices of Burton Industries are? If you should change your mind and decide you want to talk to me after all?’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t even glance at him.

‘But you aren’t going to, are you …?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘No.’

Ethan clearly remembered the first time he had seen Mia. He had been twenty-two, about to start his PhD at LSE, and Mia had been sixteen years old—a new sixth-form pupil at the school where his mother was headmistress. Her father had decided that it would be better for Mia to attend a boarding school after her mother had been involved in a car accident the year before, resulting in Kay being in a wheelchair, with her face badly scarred, and quite unable to deal with the needs of her young daughter.

It had been Mia’s first time away from home, and she had obviously been very nervous at having tea, along with all the other new girls, at the home of her new headmistress.

She had stood silent and alone at the back of his mother’s private sitting room, nothing at all like those other self-confident sixteen-year-old girls vying for the attention of the headmistress’s son. Instead she had exuded all the vulnerability of a puppy taken too early from its mother: her eyes too big for her face, the corn-gold hair long and silky, a vulnerable curve to the delicacy of her chin.

Ethan had felt sorry for her—had realized that she couldn’t know any of the other new girls yet. Her sweet shyness had revealed how traumatised she was at leaving her parents and her home for the first time, and it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for Ethan to go and talk to her, to ease some of her nervousness, and for a friendship of sorts to develop between the two of them after that initial meeting.

An intermittent friendship, admittedly, with Ethan away at university most of the time, but he had always made a point of seeing and speaking with Mia at least once when he came home for the weekend or holidays.

It had seemed entirely natural too that Ethan should take the job offered to him with her father’s company when he finally left university, and it hadn’t been that big a step when he’d seen Mia again, looking stunningly beautiful and completely grown up in a figure-hugging red gown as she acted as her father’s hostess at the company Christmas party, for him to realise he was deeply attracted to this more mature Mia.

It had been an attraction she had seemed to more than reciprocate when she’d accepted his invitation to dinner, and the two of them had begun to see each other on a regular basis.

Ethan had dated often during his university years, and gone to bed with quite a few of those women, but his relationship with Mia hadn’t been like anything he had known in the past: emotionally intense, and physically satisfying in a way Ethan had never experienced with anyone else. Then or since …

The woman now sitting on the park bench wasn’t the Mia he had known. This woman wasn’t in the least shy, and as for that appealing sweetness that had once brought out such a protective instinct in him—this older, assertive Mia was more like a Rottweiler than a defenceless puppy! So much so that Ethan certainly wouldn’t have attempted to even take her in his arms, let alone make love with her.

Her expression was scornful now as she looked at him. ‘Goodbye, Ethan.’

He sighed heavily. ‘No matter what you may choose to believe to the contrary, Mia, my liking for you never had anything to do with my mother or my job at Burton Industries.’

Mia only heard the first part of that statement—Ethan had ‘liked’ her! When Mia’s naive and trusting heart had hoped that he would fall in love with her, as she had fallen in with him …

‘How fortunate for you that you got over the emotion so quickly!’

Ethan gave a shake of his head. ‘I don’t know enough about who or what you are any more to know how I feel towards you now,’ he acknowledged heavily. ‘The Mia I once knew was sweet and warm, utterly enchanting, and I don’t believe she would ever have deliberately hurt anyone, either.’

Her cheeks became flushed at the rebuke she heard in his tone. ‘I had to grow up some time, Ethan.’

‘So you did,’ he accepted huskily.

And he obviously didn’t like the way in which she had grown up! Well, that was just too bad—because Mia much preferred herself this way. Tougher. Stronger.

Ethan took a large brown envelope out of his pocket. ‘You might like to have this.’

‘What is it?’ Mia said stiffly, totally ignoring the envelope he held out to her.

‘Why don’t you take a look inside and see?’ He laid the envelope down on the bench beside her before turning and walking away.

Which was when the tears began to fall hotly, scaldingly down Mia’s cheeks.

Damn!

Crying was the last thing Mia wanted to do. Instead she wanted to scream and shout, to wail against whatever cruel fate had brought Ethan back into her life.

Most of all she wanted to stop the aching agony that washed over her in increasingly painful waves just from seeing him again.

Instead, she picked up the brown envelope Ethan had left for her, ripping it open to tip the contents out onto the bench beside her.

And instantly felt all the colour drain from her cheeks …