by Tessa Radley
That too-brief moment of shared—Jay didn’t know what to call it—intimacy? Hell on earth?—was over.
He pushed his unfinished coffee aside. “I’ll come with you.”
* * *
The following morning, Georgia discovered that Jay had already beaten her back to the hospital coffee shop. Wary, she idled at the entrance, wrinkling her nose at the sharp tang of antiseptic that she encountered everywhere in the hospital, even here.
Toughen up!
Georgia took a breath and approached Jay’s table.
Yesterday, he’d betrayed her. So what! It wasn’t the first time she’d been betrayed; it wouldn’t be the last. Today, after seeing the cardiologist, they had business to take care of. Her father would expect nothing less. She was strong. Pure steel. That’s how he had forged her.
“I knew you’d turn up here sometime.”
Jay gave her an easy smile as he rocked back in the chair and folded his arms behind his head. His light blue business shirt pulled tight across his chest, revealing ridges of muscle Georgia had no business noticing.
“Is your father out yet?” he asked.
She unglued her gaze from his chest and shook her head.
In the bright light of morning, fear still tasted bitter at the back of her throat. The second round of blood tests had been reassuring. It hadn’t been a heart attack. Though further tests were being performed right now as a precaution.
“Has Charis been in touch?”
She shook her head again, her stomach winding tighter than a spring. She’d left messages everywhere for her sister. On her cell phone. Her home phone. Her social media pages. At the beach house in the Hamptons. Nothing. And when she’d called Lissa—Charis’s best friend—she’d learned Lissa hadn’t heard much from Charis lately. Her sister had been too busy with preparing Kingdom’s next collection.
All the pressure was getting to Georgia. Normally, she thrived under pressure. The challenge. The cut and thrust of deals and deadlines. But it was nothing like this gut-wrenching emotional tumult she was contending with now.
“She’ll come,” Jay said.
“I don’t know. When she quit, it sounded pretty final to me.” Then she realized Jay wasn’t talking about Charis coming back to work at Kingdom, but about visiting their father. Perhaps he already knew her sister better than she did. He was going to marry her after all. That caused a maddening twinge in her chest, and made her to snap, “I hope she calls soon—we need her to finalize the spring collection.” And Kingston must be missing her...
What if Charis never got the chance to say goodbye?
God. Her father had been so pale...
Georgia had been so angry with him...at his arrogant assumption that he could run her life...force her to marry a man of his choosing. And then he’d collapsed, and her world had fallen apart.
Distractedly, Georgia combed the fingers of her left hand through her hair, and the tiny diamonds on her Cartier watch glittered like dewdrops caught in the sun’s first rays. Kingston had recently been talking about getting into watches. She and Roberta had argued against it...
How she wished she could have that time over. She would have been more cooperative.
She looked up to catch Jay studying her. His hazel eyes had taken on the watchful green glint that always meant his brain was working at full tilt. And this time, she was the focus.
“What?” she demanded, instantly on the defensive. She’d never liked feeling like a bug under a microscope. Any way, she wasn’t the traitor here.
“Let me get you a coffee.”
“Because coffee solves everything?” Despite the under-eye concealer she’d applied, she suspected last night’s lack of sleep showed. “Sit—you already have one.” She extracted her wallet from her Kingdom Traveler tote and headed for the counter.
She felt antsy this morning, hot and bothered as though her clothes were too tight. They weren’t.
Less than two hours ago, she’d finally gone home for a change of clothes. For once, she’d given no thought to what she’d flung on. Clad in the boyfriend blazer she’d worn yesterday, a pair of black wool trousers bought in Paris and her favorite black suede boots, she might appear dismally funereal, but there was nothing wrong with her clothes.
The problem lay with her.
She could feel Jay’s eyes boring into her as she waited in line. It made her uncomfortable. Despite his concern, she didn’t trust his motives for one moment.
Deep down—or maybe not so deep down—she was mad at him.
Murderously mad.
She accepted that much of Jay’s work was highly confidential—he was the in-house finance guru after all—but yesterday it had been her personal life...her future...that he’d colluded with her father about. Maneuvering so that he could marry Charis—to secure himself a major chunk of Kingdom stock. And under the weight of the eternal debt she owed Jay, she was hurt and disappointed and very, very angry with him—the cocktail of emotions was confusing and exhausting. How was she supposed to pretend nothing had happened? Business as usual? Pah! She didn’t know how she and Jay were going to be able to work together.
Even though he’d saved her father’s life, she was far from ready to forgive him.
It was an impossible situation.
* * *
Once back at the table, Georgia set the mug of coffee down and bent forward to slide her wallet into her patent leather tote. Kingdom, of course, but last season’s stock, Jay noted as he rocked back in his chair.
Sitting down, she said, “You and I need to talk.”
There was a cool edge to her voice and her eyes had an uncanny resemblance to her father’s. Yet, something more human, something close to reproach lurked in the blue depths.
Jay winced.
How had she found out? His chest contracted. He was never going to be ready for this confrontation—that’s why he’d kept putting it off.
Coward.
“Okay, give it to me with both barrels.” He braced himself.
“Your involvement in my father’s scheme—” Her voice broke.
For a moment, he failed to absorb the meaning of her words. Then the blood rushed out of his head. She didn’t know! He’d been granted a reprieve.
“You should’ve warned me!”
“Wait—” he demanded.
She warded him off with both hands. “Don’t, Jay. No excuses.”
He leaned back in the chair, light-headed, his heart jolting inside his chest. “I never make excuses.”
No, he only lied to her every damned day.
“I expected better of you, Jay.” Her lashes fluttered down, veiling the flash of whatever emotion—anger? Frustration? Both?—that had flickered within, and her silver hair fell forward to hide her face. But Jay was too desperate to allow her to shut him out.
“Georgia!”
She lifted her head and swung her hair back. “What?”
To his horror, Jay saw that her eyes glistened. Tears. That was why she’d looked away. Georgia hadn’t wanted him to see how much she was hurting.
“I thought—” She broke off.
The bewilderment that clouded those beautiful eyes almost ripped his heart out. He suppressed the urge to reach for her hand. To touch her. To offer the comfort she didn’t want from him.
“Look at me,” he demanded.
The look she turned on him was scorching; the tears had been seared away. Jay infinitely preferred her anger to her tears.
Then with a jerky movement, Georgia lifted the mug and took a hasty sip, sputtered and started to cough. Black liquid splashed everywhere as the mug tilted precariously. He reached out and steadied the cup.
When he looked up, Georgia’s eyes were streaming.
She glanced around frantically. “Oh, damn!”
Jay pulled a white
linen handkerchief out of his pocket. “Here, take this.”
“It will stain.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Thank you.” She took it, her hand brushing his for an instant. She appeared oblivious to his sudden stillness. She wiped her eyes. Quickly. Surreptitiously. As though she feared people might see her crying. When all trace of tears had been wiped away, she turned her attention to the table and dabbed furiously at the spreading pool of spilled coffee.
Head bent, she murmured, “Damn you! I thought there was some degree of respect between us.”
The words ripped into his heart. He deserved them—but not for this.
“I didn’t expect you to stoop to conspiring with my father to marry me off to Adam Fordyce. Under our rivalry, I thought—”
Jay didn’t want to hear more.
He couldn’t claim their competition was all in her mind. Hell, he’d provoked her often enough. It had offered great camouflage for his real feelings after all. But he’d never colluded against her.
He scooted the chair closer, leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Here’s the truth. I couldn’t have warned you about his plan involving Fordyce—because I didn’t know anything about it myself.”
She stopped blotting the tabletop and looked up. He’d never seen her eyes so endlessly blue.
“That’s not possible. How could you not have known? He gets you to vet everything that might come back to bite him—”
“—in the ass,” Jay finished for her.
Her mascara was smudged, and there was a spark of disbelief in her eyes. His heart clenched. She’d never looked more fragile. Or madder at him.
“I’m not lying to you. The first inkling I had was when I started reading those damned documents after they jammed the copier. I didn’t get to see what your father was up to until the Managing Committee meeting was about to start.” Jay paused. It was crucial that she believed him. “Your father outsourced his ‘special project’ to an external law firm he hired because he knew I wouldn’t have the time. Because I’ve spent the past week clearing my desk.” And fighting to gather the courage to confess his labyrinth of lies to Georgia. “I’m going on leave, remember?”
“Oh, God. After everything that happened yesterday...” She sighed. “I forgot about that.”
Jay could see the wheels spinning in her brain.
“Trust me, had I known about his plan, I would’ve told your father it was a dumb-ass idea.”
She made a choking sound. It was less than a laugh, but the tightness around her eyes eased a little.
“I’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation,” she said. “Or maybe not. He hates being challenged. You’d probably have been out of a job.”
Not likely. But Jay didn’t argue the point. He was too relieved that she was still talking to him. It felt like the sun and the stars had come out...at the same time.
But the spell of brightness would be all too brief. Once he told her—
“Although when you marry Charis, your job will be secure.”
His teeth snapped shut so hard at her words that his jaw hurt. “I’m not going to marry your sister.”
Georgia took her time examining his every feature. Finally, she appeared satisfied. “And Kingston knows that?”
“We’ve never discussed it.”
Now he wasn’t being entirely truthful, though there had never been an explicit conversation. For months, the old codger had implied that Jay’s advancement within Kingdom might be fast-tracked if he obeyed certain instructions. And for months, Jay had stubbornly ignored the not-so-subtle nudges to date his boss’s youngest daughter. His long-term interest did not lie with the Kingdom, but with something—or rather, someone—else.
Clearly, he should’ve taken Kingston’s ham-handed attempts at matchmaking more seriously—or at least found a way to mention them to Georgia over one of the pitiful cups of take-out coffee he brought her most days—but he’d had no desire to bad-mouth the most important man in Georgia’s life. Besides, he’d already stumbled so far down the unholy path of silence that it had become a habit to say nothing at all.
So, here he was—once again—trapped in the quagmire of his own silent stupidity.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that you didn’t know.”
Like magic the shadow that had hung over him evaporated. “You believe me?”
“Why on earth wouldn’t I?” She studied him as though she were trying to read his mind. “You have plenty of faults, but dishonesty has never been one of them.”
Jay shut his eyes. All at once, the shadows closed back in, darker than ever. There were so many things he needed to confess. But Georgia was hardly in the right frame of mind to learn about his deception. She had enough on her plate. He’d had the best of intentions to tell her the truth. How he’d met her at a fashion trade show. How he’d comforted her after her fiancé’s devastating betrayal, before the crash that took away her memory of their time together. But despite his monthly task list, his daily coffee deliveries, he’d allowed the days of silence to stretch into weeks, the weeks into months, the months into years.
Two damned years.
Too many years to have any excuse. It was unforgivable.
“Look at me, Jay!”
Weary and defeated, he opened his eyes.
“Although there are times I wish you were a little less...blunt,” Georgia said as she crumpled his coffee-stained handkerchief in the palm of her hand. She reached for her tote and dropped it inside. “I’ll get this laundered for you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shrugged. “I’ve got plenty more.”
“It’ll come clean.”
She’d set her jaw in that stubborn way he’d grown to know far too well.
“And if it doesn’t, then I’ll buy you another.” She swung back to face him, suddenly animated. “Hey, you know what? We don’t do handkerchiefs. We do scarves. But no handkerchiefs—not in any of our collections. But we should. And not small dainty female handkerchiefs, but larger man-size ones.” Her eyes had taken on fire in the way that they did when she was totally consumed by work.
Always Kingdom.
My Kingdom. Anytime. Anywhere.
Jay suppressed a sigh of frustration as the marketing refrain echoed in his head. It all came back to Kingdom. Every time. Yet, yesterday everything had changed. The foundations of her world had been reconstructed, but Georgia didn’t appear to have noticed.
Maybe she never would...
“They’d be white—or maybe not quite white. Ivory. And made from the finest cotton.” She paused. “Or perhaps linen, a fine light-as-a-feather linen that both women and men would appreciate. I like that! What do you think, Jay?” Then without giving him a chance to retort that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about handkerchiefs, Georgia added in a rush, “Perhaps with the Kingdom crown motif printed in white. I like it! I’ll speak to Charis. Let’s see what she thinks.”
Then the light went out in her eyes.
“If she ever comes back to Kingdom.”
“Georgia—”
She rose in a hurry. “I hate hospitals. This waiting...this sterilized place...is killing me. I’m going to go check if there’s any news.”
Jay’s heart ached for her. What was really killing her was her corrosive fear that the manipulative son of a bitch who was her father might actually die.
Four
Georgia hurried along the hospital corridor and stopped abruptly in a doorway.
Kingston was already back in his private ward. The luxurious suite belonged in a five-star hotel, not a hospital, with its super-sized television, dining table and chairs, not to mention a seating area complete with a pair of leather couches and a coffee table buckling under the weight of floral bouquets. Propped up on a mountain of snowy white pillows, her father
was arguing with a nurse, as was to be expected.
“Give me that!” He struggled to sit up.
The nurse ignored the rude demand and calmly pointed the remote she held at the window. “Mr. Kinnear, you won’t be comfortable staring into the glare all day,” she said in a bright cheerful tone, even as the state-of-the-art blinds whirred shut.
“I want that blind open!”
Georgia rapidly discovered the reason for her father’s disgust: he’d been refused discharge. It only took her a moment to get the cardiologist’s number from the nurse and update herself, while her father bickered in the background. Although the tests had indicated nothing of concern, the cardiologist was firm about keeping him for a further twenty-four-hour observation period.
Once she’d terminated a second call to the concierge doctor her father paid a fortune to retain, Georgia cast the nurse an apologetic smile, then waded into the fray.
“Dad, give the poor woman a break!”
The nurse shot her father a long look, muttered something and wisely bustled out.
“Must’ve recruited her from the marines.” Kingston’s frustration was about to cause him to rupture a blood vessel. “She won’t let me smoke, even tried to tell me it’s against the rules. Rules? I’ve never followed any rules. Now open that damned blind.”
Jay was right: anyone who had the misfortune of having to deal with her father while he was incapacitated deserved danger pay. “All the other blinds are open. She’s only trying to make sure you’re comfortable.” Georgia told him. Yet, still she found herself pressing the button on the remote so that the blind lifted. The habit of obeying her father was ingrained bone deep.
He blinked against the bright influx of light. “That’s better,” he persisted. “The day I lie down and listen to some bad-tempered witch is the day I leave here feet first.”
“Kingston!”
But he was already looking past her to the door. “Where is Jay? Call him. Tell him to get his ass up here, will you?”
“He’s downstairs. I’m sure he’ll be here in a few minutes.” Moving to her father’s side, she reached out and covered his hand with hers, relishing the warmth of living flesh beneath her touch. He might be impatient, bad-tempered and cantankerous, but he was alive. She stroked his hand. “I’m here.”
