Authors: Laura Carter
He slows us down with the music and pushes me away, spinning under his arm. As I return, he drops his foot in front of mine, bending me back toward the floor, the weight of my body resting in his arm at the small of my back. He leans his face toward me, so close I can feel his heat at my neck. My body yearns for his kiss. My lips part and my hips rise reflexively toward him.
He lifts his head excruciatingly slowly up my neck, toward my ear and whispers. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kiss you.”
He pulls me back up to standing as the band switches to the next track. I can’t tell whether my head is fuzzy from dancing, alcohol, or the ten thousand thoughts and emotions running in all directions through it. Taking my hand again, he begins to turn me, slower this time.
“I know you have your reservations,” he finally says.
“Yes,” I manage, fighting to remember what they are. “You’re a client, for a start and—”
“And?”
“And I can’t help but wonder whether I can trust you. I just can’t work you out. You’re up and down. Your family and friends tell me you’re a great guy. Yet, I know you’re hiding something from me and I don’t like it.”
He turns us through the legato verse, his eyes never leaving mine, challenging me. I watch his Adam’s apple move under his skin. I close my eyes to stop myself from wanting to kiss it.
“All you need to know is that I always get what I want.”
“And what is it that you want, Gregory Ryans?”
“You.”
He presses his thigh between my legs until I can feel my blood pounding in my clit, my entrance wet, craving him. I bite down hard on my lip. I can’t let him take the upper hand.
“You’re not going to let this go are you?” he asks.
“I can let it go. I can forget about it. God, that would be so much easier right now. But I’m hoping you don’t want me to.”
“How much do you need to know to just let go?”
“All of it. All of you.”
“I’m not the kind of man who exposes himself.”
“Then just tell me something. Tell me something true.”
There’s a momentary flutter of panic in my chest, which I think is fear that he might not let me in, a feeling that makes no sense to me at all. Then he sighs. “Like I said, Lawrence has been with my mother since I was ten. He moved us over here from South Africa and we’ve lived with him ever since. He met my mother when we were still living with my biological father.”
He swallows as he pushes me away to twirl.
“My father was a drunk, probably still is. The only thing he ever cared about was work, his businesses. He’d come home late, stinking of drink and he’d beat my mother. The first time I saw him do it I swore to myself that I’d make him pay.”
I watch his chest rise then fall on his exhales as he continues to turn us to the beat with his attention set over my shoulder, detached.
It’s that small shift that brings realisation crashing into me, almost throwing me from my feet. I stop turning and release myself from his grip.
“That’s it. That’s the connection. Your father, he’s...he’s Sea People International, isn’t he? Your father is Pearson.”
Gregory stands facing me, motionless. I have his answer.
“You want to kill the company he made. That’s what this is all about.”
He steps toward me and reaches a hand to my face. I step back on impulse.
“It’s unethical, Scarlett, I know that. But it isn’t illegal. You aren’t doing anything wrong. I wouldn’t let you.”
“But Lawrence and Williams. They know. Lawrence has such a big stake in the company.”
Gregory sighs. “Lawrence has known my father for a long time. They don’t see each other, don’t really know each other socially but Lawrence keeps a stake in Sea People through Connektions. Keep your enemies close and all. As long as Lawrence holds that stake, he can keep tabs on my father.”
The room starts to spin. “I—I need to leave. I need to get my head straight.” I march from the dance floor, grabbing my bag from our table, and head for outside.
“Scarlett!” I hear him call after me as I run up the grand staircase.
Outside in the freezing dark night he grabs my arm, turning me to face him.
“Scarlett,” he pants, “if you don’t want to work on the deal, tell me, but don’t just leave.”
A lump forms in my throat as I look at his pleading face. “I get why you want to do it, Gregory, I do but I don’t think I can be part of it.”
He drops his hands to his sides and looks at me through a child’s eyes.
“I just, I just need to think,” I say, placing a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
Chapter Ten
I was five years old the last day my mother kissed my forehead goodbye at the school gates. It was overcast, I remember. The sun was fighting to peek through the clouds, the wind was blowing lightly, drifting the scent of fresh cut grass past my nose.
My mother rubbed her lipstick from my brow with her thumb, then knelt in front of me, her hands resting on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length. She looked at me, from my head to my toes and made the kind of face that should be a smile but I thought it looked like a sad face, just upside down. If I’d known then, I would’ve taken in just how beautiful she was, her big hazel-green eyes, her soft, flowing, glossy brown hair. Her plump red lips and the dimples that formed beside them when she spoke.
“Go on, you don’t want to be late,” she said.
She watched me as I ran with my bag to meet my friends. She was still watching when Mrs. Tindale put her hand on my shoulder, encouraging me toward the big wooden door of the school. When I waved at her she blew me a kiss and mimed “I love you,” pointing to her eye, then her heart and, just before I walked through the door, at me.
It wasn’t very often that my father was able to pick me up from school with his shifts at hospital so I was bouncing with delight when I saw him waiting to collect me at four o’clock. He smiled at me but he didn’t seem happy to be there. I wondered what I’d done wrong and if I was in trouble.
I walked across the playground to meet him, replaying everything I’d done in the last day. I’d eaten all of my dinner. I’d bathed when I was told. I’d cleaned my teeth. I was a little late getting dressed for school that morning because I wanted to watch the end of my cartoon and my mother did seem more vexed than usual. She’d tugged my hair into a tight ponytail and yanked the toggles on my coat to fasten them. Surely, she didn’t tell my father on me.
When I reached my father at the school gates, he took my hand and said
“Hello”
but he didn’t speak whilst we walked to his car and he didn’t speak for the entire journey home. I knew I must be in big trouble. When I got home, I realised why. My mother had packed up most of her wardrobe and gone away. She really was cross with me.
Stupid, stupid cartoons, why did I watch them?
It was the start of the weekend and my father spent the next day at home even though he sometimes had to operate at the weekend if there were neurology emergencies. I spent most of the day in my nursery playing. My father did everything he needed to do for me. Everything my mother would normally do, like make my toast, comb my hair, help me get dressed. But he barely uttered a word to me as he did it. He must have been very cross with me for making my mother go away.
My father had different women visiting the house all day. He made them tea in a pot and talked to them about me in the lounge. Sometimes I popped my head out of the nursery to listen but if my father caught me I closed the door and ran back to my toys. One of the women, younger than the others, was called Sandy. I remember thinking she had a roly-poly stomach, big warm hands and sparkling eyes. My father brought her into my nursery to meet me.
She had the biggest smile I’d ever seen, and bright, white teeth shone between her big, red lips.
“Hello, Scarlett, I’m Sandy,” she said.
“Hello. I’m Scarlett and I’m five and I like your hair,” I said, turning a finger in her short black waves.
“Well thank you. I like your hair too.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
My father suddenly had a tickle in his throat. He cleared it and said, “Scarlett, you shouldn’t ask a lady her age.”
“That’s okay, Doctor Heath,” Sandy said. “I’m nineteen, twenty next week.”
I smiled and offered her one of my dolls. She knew exactly what to do with my toys and played with me on the floor. I liked her a lot and I told my father so that night. I asked if Sandy would be able to come to see me again. My father said she might come to live with us. I was delighted.
After a day or so my father went back to work at the hospital and I started to wonder when my mother would come back. My father didn’t seem to want to talk about it so I asked Sandy. Sandy said my mother had gone away and it might be a while before I saw her again. I didn’t understand why she’d gone away just because I took a long time to get dressed. I’d taken as long to get dressed other days and she’d never gone away.
I was so confused I started to cry. Sandy hugged me and said I could stay home from school, “just for one day”. We made pancakes and ate them with crispy bacon and Sandy’s special syrup. It was the best day off school I’d ever had. In fact, it was the only day off school I’d ever had.
That night, when my father came home from work, he tucked me into bed and read me a book. He read my favourite,
A Witch Got on at Paddington Station.
I was resting my eyes when he finished. He kissed my forehead and turned off my lamp then told me repeatedly, “It isn’t your fault.” I didn’t understand what he was talking about but he sounded upset so I decided not to ask.
Chapter Eleven
In the light of day, the new dress, shoes, bag and jewelry seem to have lost their luster. As I pack them back into their covers and cases, resigned to returning them to Gregory, I replay that conversation and keep seeing the pained look on his face as he told me about his past.
His father owns Sea People International.
This is a hostile takeover.
That’s why he’s paying over the odds for something he doesn’t want. That’s why Lawrence indirectly keeps control in Sea People. He’s doing on paper what Gregory is doing in his mind, keeping watch over his nemesis.
Jack’s words come back to me.
“Do not fuck this up.”
The opportunity I could have by keeping Eclectic Technologies
and Gregory as a client is enormous. It’s a career game changer.
I slump down onto the edge of my bed and cradle a pillow. But that’s just not me. Gregory was right, a hostile takeover isn’t illegal but he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons. It’s underhanded. He’s plotting with Lawrence and Williams to take what his father most cherishes. I’m not that lawyer. I’m not that person.
My moral compass points in one direction and that isn’t the direction of operating in the grey, blurring the lines of what’s right and wrong in the eyes of the law. Gregory wants revenge and I just don’t think I’m the person to help him take it.
But I’m torn up in pieces over this man I’ve known for less than two weeks.
That look on his face.
My body falls back on the bed. I pull my legs up, feet on the mattress, and drop the pillow over my face, as if hiding from the world would make this all go away.
I could make this disappear. I just tell him I won’t act for Eclectic. Simple as that. I’ve seen corrupt lawyers. First they dump time on a matter to be paid by a client. Next they change documents without telling the other side. Then they’re paying people off to get what they want. Acting for Gregory would be the first step down a slippery slope.
“But I want to help him,” I mumble into the pillow, crushing it harder to my face to stop the words.
With my only intention being to spend my day with my father, I pull on my oldest and most stretched pair of skinny jeans, and an equally comfortable oversized knit jumper. I contemplate makeup but decide washing my face, cleaning my teeth and tying my hair in a rough knot will do.
After tapping on his bedroom door, I slip into my father’s room. He’s still sleeping but I take a seat in a wicker chair by his bed and watch him. Sleep is the only time I can guarantee he’s at peace, not hating his life stuck in this bedroom with the demon in his mind stealing him from his old life.
I watch the rise and fall of his chest and the intermittent flickering of his eyelids as he dreams. My father used to do everything for me. I can’t imagine growing up with a father who hated his own flesh and blood so much he’d let his little boy see his mother being beaten. The two people who are supposed to love him and cherish him beyond all reason, fighting, destroying his life. Making him grow into a man whose past follows him like a dark shadow and dictates the kind of person he wants to be years later.
Pulling my knees into my chest, I lean my head on the side of the chair, somewhere between awake and asleep, that window of irrational thought. The dangerous place where nightmares are a reality.
I watch myself in my father’s hospital as a child, in his office, standing on a pink plastic stool in my dungarees and sparkling pink shoes, trying to reach up to the height of his desk. My father is young and healthy. A stethoscope hangs over the shoulders of his white coat. His skin is golden and his hair still has traces of dark brown intertwined with the grey strands.
Not like the pale, aged face sleeping in front of me.
I’m handing him bandages which he’s packing into an already full storage cupboard, when a male nurse dressed head to toe in pastel green bursts into the room and yells that there’s an emergency. I follow my father as he runs down the blue and white corridor.
I remember the day as if it were yesterday, except now we’re in an operating theatre and this isn’t my true memory at all.
A woman who’s been badly beaten lies on an operating table, bleeding heavily, utterly helpless. Tubes rest into the creases of her mouth pulling it wide and open. Her purple eyes are swollen shut.
My father begins to shout orders into the commotion but the room falls silent. As I watch the silent hospital drama unfold, a noise builds in my ear until it’s loud enough for me to recognise as soft sobs. In the corner of the theatre, a little boy sits on the floor, his knees pulled into his body, his head tucked under his hands.
“Mummy, please be okay, Mummy,” he sniffs, with a hint of South African twang.
The boy has blood on his shirt. He looks up at me through wide brown irises, the same irises that pleaded with me as I left the charity gala. Tears stream down the boy’s beautiful young face.
“Please don’t let her die,” he cries.
My lungs jump to action with a thick, jagged breath and my chest aches so bad I raise my hand across it. Looking at my father, still sleeping despite my panic, I know that he’d do everything he could to help the little boy.
* * *
When I eventually leave my father and head downstairs, Sandy has made my favourite, pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon. She sets a plate with four pancakes in front of me on the breakfast bar.
“There’s plenty more if you want.” She smiles, pouring me a large cup of coffee.
“Amazing,” I grunt through a large, unfeminine bite. That I hardly slept last night has left my stomach aching and my mouth tasting acidic with hunger.
“Aren’t you eating?” I ask as she busies herself around the kitchen in a blue blouse and a black a-line skirt that I bought her for Christmas last year. Not an outfit she’d usually wear in the house.
“I’ve already eaten, I’ve been up for a while.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
She shakes her head, scrubbing bacon fat from the grill pan in the steaming water of the ceramic white sink.
“How was your evening?” she asks. “You know, I wasn’t sure if you’d be back here last night.”
“Sandy!” I blush. “If I didn’t come back it would’ve been for fear of catching Jackson humping your leg or some such.”
She tuts and puts a marigold gloved hand on her hip.
“I saw you two flirting,” I tell her.
“You have a very vivid imagination.”
“Mmm-hmm, and I suppose I’m also imagining seeing you dressed in a skirt and blouse to scrub the dishes?”
“I thought I’d pop out today, that’s all.”
“With Jackson?”
“No, not with Geoffrey Jackson. My goodness.” She wafts a hand as if she’s annoyed but the sides of her cheeks betray her smile as she turns back to the sink. “Anyway, I asked about
your
night.”
The sick, churning feeling comes back to my stomach and I push away the remainder of my pancakes.
“Well, actually it didn’t end very well. Gregory and I sort of had a fight. Well, a disagreement.”
“Does that mean you’re, you know, together?” she asks, turning from the sink, drying her hands on a towel.
“Oh, erm, no, no, we’re not together.” And we aren’t, so why is this whole thing driving me to the brink of sanity. “Gregory’s, well, he’s a client. Maybe not even that anymore.”
“I’ve not known your other clients buy you designer dresses and jewels.”
The problem is, I don’t know whether he bought those for the woman he danced with, the woman whose skin he inhaled and pressed his warm lips against or his lawyer. The lawyer he needed to bribe into a dodgy deal.
“Sandy, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” She pulls up a stool and sits opposite me, her hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea.
“What would you do if someone asked you to do something that you knew wouldn’t really be right but for their sake you wanted to do it and doing it somehow felt like the right thing to do?”
Sandy regards me with a frown, assessing a person she’s unsure of, a person she doesn’t know. Or perhaps my own subconscious just thinks that.
“Well, I would think that if you wanted to do that maybe
wrong
thing for that person, that person must mean a lot to you. Having said that, if you mean as much to that person as he, or they, do to you, perhaps they shouldn’t have asked you to do something that wasn’t really right in the first place?”
“Okay, and supposing they said that, or implied that, you had the option not to do, the thing, but you really wanted to help them?”
“Scarlett, what’s this about?”
“Well, I can’t really say.”
“This is what you and Gregory argued over?”
I nod.
“Look, Scarlett, I know you and I know how you’ve been brought up. I know the person you are and whatever this thing is, I know you’ll make the right decision. Just remember that you haven’t known this Gregory chap for long. It’s a tough time at the moment, with your father, and I understand Gregory is wealthy and—”
“It’s not about that, Sandy, I promise. He’s more than that, much more, I think.” The words seem for the first time to be real when I say them aloud. “I want to help him, I really do, more than anything, but I know it’s wrong. I can’t explain why I want to help him so much. It doesn’t make sense. It probably doesn’t even matter after last night.”
Sandy suppresses a smile and shrugs.
“Did you really say ‘chap’?” I tease, changing the subject.
“What’s wrong with ‘chap’?”
“Nothing, nothing at all, it’s very happening.”
She clips me playfully with her tea towel. “Be quiet, you. It’s hard to be happening in your forties.”
“I can see that.” I laugh.
Sandy hangs the tea towel onto the rail of the range oven door then walks beside me and places one hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. I’m going to see if Doctor Heath is ready for breakfast.”
I think about everything my father has ever done for me and all the things the little boy from my dream didn’t have. His childhood blackened undeservedly. It hurts me that my mother left and didn’t want me. I can’t imagine how awful it must’ve been for Gregory to see the things he saw.
If you mean as much to that person they do to you, perhaps they shouldn’t have asked you to do something that wasn’t really right in the first place
. He didn’t. He said I could walk away from the deal. My heart beats faster in my chest. Maybe he does care for me.