Читать книгу Keeping Secrets - Фиона Бранд - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe discreet vibration of his cell interrupted Damon Smith’s stride as he jogged the hard-packed sand of his private island in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf.
The conversation was to the point. His younger brother, Ben, was quitting. He would not be in the office tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future.
Reason? He had run off with Damon’s pretty blonde personal assistant.
Jaw locked, Damon turned his back on the glare of the setting sun. An icy breeze cooled his overheated skin and flattened his damp T-shirt against the tense muscles of his back, but he barely noticed. For an odd moment sensory perception seemed to fall away and Damon was spun back in time. Almost a year to the day, when another PA, Zara Westlake, had run out on him, leaving her job and his bed.
Zara. Damon frowned at the image that instantly surfaced. Dark hair, direct blue eyes, finely molded cheekbones made more intriguing by a scattering of freckles. A faintly tip-tilted nose and a firm jaw, all softened by a quirky, generous mouth, which added a fascinating, mercurial depth to a face that was somehow infinitely more riveting than conventional prettiness.
The wind gusted more strongly, the chill registering, as an old wound in his shoulder and another at his hip—both courtesy of his time in the military—stiffened and began to ache. Grimly, Damon dismissed the memories of Zara, annoyed that they still had the power to stop him in his tracks, despite his attempts to put the brief fling in its proper perspective.
After all, their involvement had lasted barely a month. On a scale of one to ten, given that he had once been married for seven years, it shouldn’t have registered. Especially since Zara herself, with her usual trademark efficiency, had made it crystal clear she had only ever been interested in a short, very private affair.
“We’re in love,” Ben helpfully supplied now.
The words in love made Damon’s jaw tighten. They echoed through a childhood he preferred to forget, one Ben had no knowledge of because he had been lucky enough to be born after the untimely death of their father. Ben had never been around to experience Guy Smith’s infidelities or his corrosive temper, the long nights when Damon and his mother had borne the brunt of that temper, and the scars.
“In love.” He tried to keep the distaste out of his voice, and failed.
The words dredged up memories of the beautiful women who had hung at the edges of his father’s life, expensive women who had demanded diamonds, exotic holidays and credit cards with dizzying limits that had eaten away at the family fortune. Guy Smith had claimed to be “in love” a number of times despite his marriage. When the money had finally run out, his latest mistress had left him. He had ended up in a bar, drunk enough to make the mistake of picking a fight with someone who could hit back. He had been found unconscious on the street the next morning, and had died of a fractured skull on the way to hospital.
When Adeline Smith had gotten the news of her husband’s death, she had broken down and cried, but the tears had been ones of relief. Damon, at ten years old, nursing two cracked ribs and a broken jaw courtesy of his attempt to protect his mother from Guy’s red-faced fury when he’d discovered they were broke, hadn’t shed so much as a tear. Life had been gray and drained of hope. In the instant he heard his father had died, it had felt like stepping out of the shadows into blazing light. Six months later, Ben had been born.
Now, as Ben’s only close family, Damon had to tread carefully. His brother hadn’t endured the experiences that had shaped Damon. Ben didn’t understand how destructive out-of-control emotions could be, and he carelessly fell in and out of love on a regular basis. In a way, Ben’s cavalier approach to relationships was an uncomfortable reminder of their father. Although, thankfully, Ben had none of their father’s meanness.
Flexing his stiffening shoulder, Damon paced the hard-packed sand of the curving bay, which was punctuated by dark drifts of rock at each end. He forced himself to concentrate on his brother’s latest crisis, which this time impacted Damon directly.
For the past eighteen months he had been training Ben to help run their family’s sprawling security empire. The one his mother, with the help of her brother, Tyler McCall—Damon’s uncle—had pulled from the financial fires of near bankruptcy. Unfortunately, like their father, Ben had proven to be spectacularly disinterested in Magnum Security. It was a fact that Damon would have gotten a great deal more done if Ben had not been in the office. His assistant, Emily, however, had been smart, intuitive and almost as efficient as Zara.
With effort, he shook off a further raft of memories and refocused on the problem at hand: saving Ben from himself and retrieving Damon’s assistant. Emily was significantly involved in a crucial deal he was working on. At this juncture, it would be nearly impossible to replace her.
“Walk me through this. I didn’t think you even liked Emily.”
“How would you know? You’ve had your head buried in the McCall takeover for weeks.”
Damon could feel his blood pressure rising. “So has Emily. If you will recall she’s my PA.”
Although, to put a fine point on it, he had never appointed her to the position. Emily was a temp, the third temp he had employed over the past year while continuing to interview numerous candidates, both male and female, some with impressive degrees. Unfortunately, not one of them had possessed the exacting qualities required for the position. Qualities that had been oddly defined in Zara and which he had not realized he needed until she left him.
“Uh, not any longer. Check your email and you’ll find Emily’s resignation.”
A boarding call echoed through the phone, informing Damon that Ben and Emily were already at the airport.
Damon kept a lid on his frustration. He could live with the inconvenience of losing Emily. What really worried him was what was happening to Ben. The partying and dating aside, he was becoming immersed in the darker, undisciplined passions that had overtaken their father. Passions that had even extended to Tyler McCall, who had become the CEO of Magnum Security and the boys’ guardian following Adeline’s death from cancer when Damon was fourteen and Ben just four. As stable as Tyler, an ex-SEAL and intelligence expert had seemed, in his late forties he had fallen for a spectacularly beautiful model, then died along with her in a car accident on the romantic Mediterranean island of Medinos.
Damon’s chest tightened at the memory of the loss that, four years ago, had hit him hard. Tyler had been the father Guy Smith should have been. He had been a safe haven for both Damon and Ben until he had been ensnared by Petra Hunt, an aging model turned A-list party girl.
To lose Tyler, whose watchwords had been reliability and common sense, to the kind of liaison that had gone hand in glove with Damon’s father’s degenerate lifestyle... It had, to put it mildly, shaken Damon.
Damned if he’d let Ben fall into the same trap.
Damon’s fingers tightened on the phone. Technically, Ben had not run off with Emily yet; they were both still at the airport. There was a chance to nip the relationship in the bud if Damon kept his cool. “Don’t board the flight. I can be at the airport in an hour—we can talk this through.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ben said curtly. “Emily and I have been seeing each other for the past month. Long enough to decide that this is something special.”
“You’re only twenty—”
“Old enough to make my own decisions. Last I heard, I could go to war at eighteen if I wanted. You were younger when you married Lily.”
Damon’s brows jerked together at the mention of his ex-wife. “The two situations don’t equate.”
“Why? Because Lily left you?”
For a vibrating moment Damon was confronted by a past he took great pains to avoid thinking about, because it highlighted the singular difficulty he had with relationships. There hadn’t been one thing wrong with Lily. She had been beautiful, intelligent and sweet-natured and he had liked her, all good reasons to choose her as his wife. Unfortunately, he had never been able to give Lily the two things she had decided she wanted from him after the wedding. First, that he would fall in love with her. Second, that he would give her the children she had decided were now a deal breaker.
There was a loaded pause. “Or is it because you slept with your assistant last year,” Ben asked softly, “and you’ve suddenly decided that’s a forbidden sin?”
Damon stopped dead in his tracks. Flashes of the stark, heated passion Zara had unlocked in him, and which he had constantly failed to control, rushed back at him, making his chest tighten. “How could you know about that?”
Zara had insisted they keep the liaison secret. She had made it clear she couldn’t work for him if people knew they were involved. Damon had complied even though he hadn’t liked the condition. It had smacked of his father’s illicit affairs. Emotion might be a no-go area, but Damon preferred to keep his sexual relationships straightforward and aboveboard.
Ben’s tone was impatient. “Zara is Emily’s agent. Emily put two and two together.”
Damon’s stomach tensed as more memories of Zara surfaced. In every way, Zara was his ex-wife’s polar opposite. Exactly the kind of woman he usually took care to avoid, because of the subtle, locked-down sensuality that was just a little too interesting. Zara had been dark and curvaceous, where Lily had been blonde, athletic and slender. The differences hadn’t stopped at physical appearance. From the first moment, Zara had been a vivid, fascinating mixture of efficiency, quirky humor and unexpected passion.
Their connection had blindsided them both.
“The two situations are not the same.”
“Right on to that. What Emily and I share is more than just convenient sex.”
An image of Zara lying in bed, dark satiny hair spread over the pillow, blue eyes veiled with mysteries and secrets, assaulted him. Convenient sex? There had been nothing convenient about it. The words that sprang to mind were more along the lines of hot, reckless.
Addictive.
The same brand of intense, unruly passion that had ruined his father and Tyler and which had kept Damon awake nights because he had vowed it would never control him.
A clarifying thought that made sense of Ben and Emily’s elopement suddenly occurred to Damon. He could kick himself for not thinking of it before. “Emily’s pregnant.”
Ben made a sound of disbelief. “Emily’s not the one who got pregnant.”
Not the one who got pregnant.
The words seemed to hang in the air. Suddenly, like a piece of a puzzle falling neatly into place, Zara’s abrupt exit from Damon’s life, her disappearance for months, made perfect sense.
She had left because she had been pregnant. With his child.
Damon sucked in a deep breath and tried to think, tried to orient himself. He felt like he’d been kicked in the chest.
If Zara had had a baby—and by now, over a year on, the baby would be four months old—why hadn’t she told him?
Admittedly, they hadn’t known each other long, six weeks in total.
Long enough to get messily involved and for Damon to break a whole list of personal rules.
Long enough that he’d had trouble forgetting her. That he’d broken his last intact rule, a rule that should have been inviolable. Instead of letting Zara go and regaining his equilibrium, his distance, when she left town, he had gone after her.
He had tracked her to a small cottage in the South Island city of Dunedin. On the verge of knocking on her front door, he had abruptly come to his senses. He had known that if he walked through that door they would be in bed within minutes. Added to that, if he continued an affair that had become dangerously irresistible, he risked becoming engaged to and marrying a woman who was the exact opposite of the kind of wife he needed. A passionate, addictive, unpredictable lover who had made it clear she had no interest in a committed relationship.
Disgusted with the obsession that had clearly gotten an unhealthy grip on him, he had walked away. The only problem was, he had not been able to stay away. Months later, when he had discovered Zara had opened her own employment agency in town, instead of steering clear, he had requested that his office manager ditch the large, established firm that usually fulfilled their employment needs and start using Zara’s agency.
His fingers tightened on the cell. “How long have you known that Zara had a baby?”
Ben made an exasperated sound. “Right at this moment I’m not sure if you’re burying your head in the sand out on that fortress island of yours or if you really didn’t know. If Emily was expecting my child, I wouldn’t be afraid of fatherhood.”
Fatherhood.
Damon stared bleakly at the misty line where sky met sea. Unwittingly, Ben had gone straight for the jugular, exposing a truth Damon had no wish to confront. The whole issue of fatherhood was something he usually avoided, because it entailed facing a past he had gone to a great deal of trouble to bury and forget. It meant coming to grips with another relationship for which he was not ready or equipped.
Lily’s words when she had stormed out of their apartment came back to haunt him. I must have been out of my mind thinking I could live with a man who approaches marriage as if it’s some kind of business contract and who doesn’t want kids, ever!
He took another deep breath but, even so, when he spoke his voice was raspy. “The baby’s...all right?”
Ben said something short and flat. “You really didn’t know. Well, that takes the cake. You’re a security guru. You wrote the book on surveillance techniques and you produce software for half a dozen governments, and you don’t know when your ex-girlfriend has your child? I thought you didn’t want to know, because you don’t want kids. Lily said enough about the sub—”
“Don’t bring Lily into this.” The response was automatic, because every thought was blasted away by the fact that Zara had given birth to his child.
The one outcome he had taken care to avoid, except on one notable occasion, had happened.
He was a father.
A final boarding call echoed down the phone.
“I’ve gotta go,” Ben muttered. “Look, I’m sorry about breaking the news about Zara and the baby like this. The fact was, I thought you did know but were...you know, avoiding the whole issue.” There was a rustling sound as if Ben was holding the phone awkwardly jammed to his ear as he surrendered his boarding pass. “Emily was fairly sure you didn’t know. She seemed to think it was more that you lack emotional intelligence...whatever that means.”
There was a feminine yelp in the background along with a further rustling noise as if Ben had jammed the phone against his chest to muffle the sound for a few seconds.
Ben’s voice came back, loud and clear. “Anyway, I think we both know that trying to turn me into an executive wasn’t working. I told you right from the start that the kind of locked-down life you lead isn’t for me. I want to travel and do something with my fine arts degree. Anything but add up soulless numbers all day and stare at computer code, which, by the way, I will never understand. Don’t try to find us. I’ll send a postcard...eventually.”
A click signaled the call had been terminated.
Damon slipped the phone back into the pocket of his sweatpants. There was no point in running after Ben now. The boarding calls meant that whatever flight Ben and Emily had booked, they would be airborne before he could pull the strings needed to either detain them or delay the flight. That was no doubt the reason Ben had rung just before the flight left. Damon guessed he was lucky that Ben, who had been kicking against Damon’s authority for the past year, had called at all.
Feeling like an automaton, Damon went back over the conversation. Ben’s crack about his lack of emotional intelligence grated. Apparently, he had missed two major cues in his life, Ben’s utter lack of interest in Magnum Security and the fact that Damon had fathered a child, despite Zara assuring him there was no chance of a pregnancy.
He tried to remember the exact words Zara had used immediately after they’d had crazy, passionate, unprotected sex. She had dragged on a robe and escaped to the bathroom, pausing to send him an irritatingly neutral smile, before assuring him that he had no need to worry.
He had taken that to mean Zara had taken care of contraception. But now he knew it could also have meant that his assistant, in her usual brisk, efficient way, had been stating her intention to take full responsibility if there was a pregnancy.
Cold water splashed his ankles and Damon became aware that the tide had advanced and water was now surging around his shoes. Still absorbed with his thoughts, he strolled up the beach and headed for his house. Perched on a headland, the large multilevel house seemed to grow from the dark cliffs, stark and spare and a little forbidding. Built of stone, it reminded him of the medieval fortress Tyler had owned on the Mediterranean island of Medinos and which Damon had spent his adolescence exploring.
Fatherhood. The realization sank in a little deeper.
Damon turned to stare across the water in the direction of Auckland’s cityscape, the first glimmer of evening lights visible in the distance. Somewhere across the water existed a child who, in a profound, unassailable way, belonged to him.
Just beyond the breaking waves a sleek gannet arrowed into the water, then surfaced with a silvery fish in its beak. Damon drew in a lungful of cold air as he struggled with imperatives that were as opposite as black and white. He had long ago decided that fatherhood was not for him, but fate had intervened and he was caught and held as fast as the small, flapping fish. He could not turn his back on his child.
The sun was sinking fast, the last burnished glow infusing the clear winter air with rose and gold. The sea breeze had dropped, leaving the water glassily smooth.
He did not understand why Zara had chosen to cut him out of his child’s life, but that would soon change. In the methodical way of his mind, Damon began to formulate a plan to meet with Zara and discover what he could about the child. Although the practical to-do list seemed cold and antiseptic when he considered exactly what it meant—confronting his ex-lover about the child they had made together. And he knew exactly when that had happened—the first time they had made love.
As Damon climbed the steep cliff path to his house, memories flickered, vivid and irresistible.
Torrential rain pounding down as he held his jacket over Zara’s head to shelter her as he dropped her home after a late business dinner. He shook out the wet jacket in the dimness of her porch. She laughed as she swept soaked hair back from her forehead. With her dark hair gleaming with moisture, her cheeks flushed, suddenly she was quite startlingly beautiful.
There was a moment when he bent his head, a split second before their mouths touched, when she could have stepped away and didn’t. Instead, her breath hitched, her fingers closed on the lapels of his jacket and she lifted up on her toes for his kiss.
He caught the scent of her skin and desire closed around him like heated manacles. Sensation shuddered through him in waves as they kissed for long, spellbinding minutes. They made it to her bedroom, just.
He used a condom the first and even the second time, but in the hour before dawn, waking to Zara making slow, exquisite love to him, and caught in that strange halfway state between dream and reality, he did not.
The unprotected lovemaking had happened with blinding speed, over almost before he realized it, but that did not negate his responsibility. Zara’s pregnancy had been his fault.
Damon climbed the steps to his house and paused in the shelter of the heavy stone portico, which protected the entryway from the wind. Peeling out of his wet shoes, he pushed open the heavy, ancient door made of thick oak and bands of iron that he had imported from Medinos and headed for his shower. After drying off, he pulled on soft, faded jeans with the fluid economy of movement he had learned during his years with the military in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Not bothering with a shirt, Damon padded into his cavernous bedroom, found his laptop and keyed in the GPS program his firm used as a security measure for the company’s top executives. He typed in his brother’s phone number. Instantly a map materialized along with a tracking icon, which indicated that Ben was over the Pacific Ocean, just northeast of Auckland. It was somehow typical that Ben, with his utter disinterest in all things to do with Magnum Security, had been careless enough to forget that his phone could be tracked.
Damon checked the time then rang Walter, his head of security and one of his most trusted employees. Minutes later, Ben’s flight details were confirmed. He was headed for the island of Medinos, and would, no doubt, be staying in the clifftop fortress Tyler had left to him and Ben jointly.
Retrieving his cell, he found the only number for Zara that he had, her employment agency. After a moment of hesitation, he dialed. In the past two months, ever since he had discovered that Zara had opened her own agency, apart from picking up his initial call, he had invariably found himself shunted through to her answering service. His jaw compressed when, as usual, the call went straight through to voice mail. He left a terse message and set the phone down on his bedside table.
Stepping out onto his balcony, he studied the gray clouds building overhead, blotting out the first scattering of stars. Ben had been right in pointing out the irony that Damon specialized in designing hardware and software to collect, unlock and decode information, and yet he could not unlock the mystery of the woman who had shared his bed and then attempted to disappear with all the skill of a master spy.
Cold droplets spattered Damon’s broad shoulders as he turned from the darkening view, strolled through to the kitchen and lifted the lid on the casserole Walter’s wife, Margot, had left for him. Not for the first time, he was keenly aware of the utter emptiness of his house.
For years he had been living in a kind of deep freeze. Just over a year ago, when Zara had strolled into his office in a beige jacket and skirt that on most women would have looked shapeless and boring, but on her had somehow looked sexy, the thaw had been instant and profound.
He had wanted her. If he was ruthlessly honest, that was also the reason he had reconnected with Zara again when he found out she had opened her own employment agency. To date, he had resisted what he’d come to view as a fatal attraction, but that was about to change. The knowledge that Zara had had his child had kicked away some invisible barrier. They were linked in the most primal, intimate way a man and woman could be linked and he was no longer prepared to tolerate the distance she seemed to prefer.
From now on, they were playing by his rules.
He had not forgotten Ben. As Ben’s only close relative and the trustee of Ben’s inheritance, Damon’s course of action was clear. He needed to retrieve his brother before Ben did something completely irresponsible, like get married to a woman he had only known for a few weeks.
The retrieval of Ben, as luck would have it, dovetailed with Damon’s need to gain access to his child. Zara Westlake stood at the center of both issues, which meant that, whether she liked it or not, she would have to meet with him face-to-face.
Out of the murk of the first two objectives, a third emerged. Despite Zara’s betrayal, despite the grip the past still had on his life, he needed one more thing.
Zara Westlake back in his bed.
