“Has Miss Mills watched the tape?” Adam Andrews asked.
“She has,” Nick assured him. “We both have, and it seems there is a new will. I assume it is the document you referred to earlier. What’s the bottom line?”
The lawyer pulled out a notepad from his pocket and glanced at it before speaking. “Myrna Constantine gets twenty percent. Esmeralda Mills gets twenty percent, to be held in trust, eventually to pass on to her daughter Crimson Mills. Nicholas Constantine gets the rest.”
Crimson watched Nick, saw a look of triumph flicker across his face. Triumph, and relief, and a flash of sharp, tearing anger at the charade of it. She, on the other hand, felt frozen. She’d heard someone describe the sensation not too long ago. It might have been Nick. I froze. I went icy cold. That’s exactly how she felt now. Icy cold and frozen.
****
“Come on, Crimson.” Nick shook her shoulder, but she refused to get out of the chair and leave the conference room. The lawyer had gone to process the new will for probate. Peter Tomlinson, who had hovered down the corridor and had been the first to hear the news, had gone to brief the other directors, leaving Nick alone with Crimson.
“It’s good news,” he told her. “If you want, I can give you twenty percent of the stock. Then we’ll be exactly where we would have been if you had pulled it off. Why so glum? Hey, Crimson, wake up. Look at me. Ground control to Crimson.” He smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear, but she just sat there, as if she were a mechanical toy with the battery run out. He was getting worried. Perhaps he should call a doctor.
“What’s wrong, Crimsy?” he tried again. “Talk to me, baby.”
Finally, she looked at him. Her eyes were huge and dark. He could see shadows of hurt in them, the kind of hurt that cut deep inside. “I failed,” she said, and her voice sounded very small. “I always fail. When I was a kid, people in Longwood looked down on my family. My dad was a drunk. Mom kept a roof over our heads, although I think she sometimes got food stamps from welfare. I promised myself that one day I’d be somebody. That I’d show them all.”
“You—”
She cut him off. “I was not a bright kid. I worked hard at school, but I was never more than mediocre. So, becoming a famous lawyer or doctor or winning the Nobel Prize wasn’t on the cards. Then I discovered ballet. And it filled me with purpose. I’d be the new Margot Fonteyn, the new Natalia Makarova. I practiced until my bones ached and my toes bled. But I never made the grade. Strictly corps de ballet. Even then, I was barely good enough. It was hard, always having to worry that there were others who were better than me, and I’d be dropped the next season. And here…”
She made a small, futile gesture with one hand to encompass the building they were in. “Finally, I thought that I had achieved something. But even here I failed. Two hundred thousand dollars short of what was needed.”
Nick studied her pale face. Her eyes were bright with tears, but she was refusing to let them fall. He squatted beside her and cupped her soft cheek in his palm. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “It no longer matters. That crazy will is invalid. It’s been superseded by a more recent will. It makes no difference that you missed the profit target.”
“But that’s just it, Nicholas.” A frisson traveled over him as he heard her stilted, formal voice. He couldn’t recall Crimson ever calling him Nicholas. Perhaps right in the beginning. Now, it seemed to symbolize the wedge between them.
“It matters to me,” she said. “And what matters to me even more is that your father expected me to fail. He made me try, but he knew that I would fail. Like I always do. He set me up for failure, and it hurts.”
Nick didn’t know what to say, how to console her. In the end, he merely stood beside her, leaned over her, and enfolded her in his arms, for an instant shielding her from the world.
He’d never understood that a beneath Crimson’s prickly manner lurked a sense of inferiority, a lack of confidence. Memories rushed through his mind of how he had taunted her in the beginning. No wonder she’d thrown him out on his ear. No wonder she’d assumed that he’d never marry her for any other reason than financial gain.
****
One. Two. Three. Crimson gripped her ankles, pressed her nose to her knees and held the stretch, her legs straight on the parquet floor. Springsteen boomed on the headphones. Through the big picture window, New York City skyline glittered in the December sun, pristine beneath the thin coating of snow that had fallen overnight.
Almost a month ago, after the auction, when she had broken free from Nick’s embrace and rushed out of the office, she’d sought refuge in the apartment above Myrna and Esmeralda’s shop. A week later, she had moved into Nick’s condo. Instead of approaching her directly with the offer, he’d passed the keys to her through Esmeralda.
Loneliness welled up inside her, a hollow ache that she tried to banish with physical exercise. She had thought he would come after her. The sense of failure that had caused her to flee, the shock of being used as a pawn in a charade, had faded in a day or two. In its wake had arrived an even more dismal feeling. That of a discarded female.
Nick had simply cut her loose.
Oh, he called her every few days, hurried telephone calls to make sure she was all right. He’d sent her emails, too, telling her to be patient, telling her that he was busy and would come and see her as soon as the business shut down for Christmas.
She also missed her coworkers, Hank and Peter and Jorge and Anna, although they were keeping in touch. Short, evasive emails—everything was well, they informed her, and said they were working hard under the new management. Which, of course, was Nick.
As Crimson pressed her nose to her knees again, an icy touch landed on her back, cold fingers stroking the sliver of exposed skin between her leggings and tank top. She shrieked, scrambled up and ripped the headphones from her ears. A stream of music was left floating in the air, like a thin, distant cry.
Nick. He was dressed casually, in a green sweater and jeans, his hair windblown, a touch of color in his cheeks from the chill outside. Crimson felt her heart give a single hard thump. Had he come to make her face what she had refused to think about? She had ignored the passage of days and weeks, just as she had ignored the tenderness in her breasts and the slight nausea in the mornings.
“Sorry.” Nick’s eyes were intent on her. “I knocked before I came in.”
“Do you want to move back in for the holidays?” Crimson asked.
She knew Constantine Motors was shutting down, from today, until the beginning of January. Foreboding seized her. Was she going to become a homeless person? Her mind filled with images of ragged creatures huddled in cardboard boxes beneath bridges.
“I’ve come to bring you a Christmas present,” Nick said. “Three, actually.”
Her gaze shot up to his face. He looked tired. Tired, but elated. An odd, almost tender expression played around his mouth. Foolishly, good manners made her stammer out an apology. “Sorry…I wasn’t expecting to see you…I haven’t anything for you…”
Except, of course, the dubious news that she refused to contemplate.
“It’s okay.” Nick indicated the ballet slippers on her feet. “Practicing?”
“I thought I might get a job teaching.” Granted, in a few months she might swell up like a balloon and be as agile as a baby elephant. “Or, maybe an administrative job with a dance company, now that I have some business experience,” she hastened to add.
“So, you’re not pregnant, then?”
Phew. Talk about a direct attack. Slowly, as inevitable as a tide, color washed up her neck and spread across her cheeks. “I…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? It’s almost month, Crimson.”
She wriggled a little, like a worm on a hook. “Dancers have notoriously irregular periods. Many female athletes do. Low bodyweight, heavy training, all that…”
“And you’ve not thought to take a test?”
“I haven’t…had time to go t
o the drugstore...” She flicked him a guarded glance. Please let me pretend I’ve been too busy. Even if she was jobless, lived in a serviced apartment, and got most of her meals in the deli downstairs, she had the right to pretend that she was too busy to get a pregnancy test.
Nick shrugged and gave her a small smile that seemed to hold a glimmer of satisfaction. “Perhaps it’s better not to know yet,” he said, and handed her a large, slim envelope. “Present number one.”
Curious, Crimson studied him, then directed her attention to the envelope and tore it open. Inside, she found a single sheet of paper. Constantine Motors. Income statement. Estimate. Her eyes settled on the figure at the bottom of the column of numbers.
Profit for the year. $7,346,372.
She looked up at Nick. “That’s above target,” she said, puzzled. “Almost fifty thousand dollars above the target.”
He nodded. “We made two more Spurs. We had underestimated the demand for right-hand-drive cars. An Australian media tycoon wanted one. We made it black and orange and called it Spur Amber. A friend of the Japanese guy who bought Spur Jet wanted an identical one. We called it Spur Obsidian. The factory worked overtime every night. The employees didn’t get paid extra. They donated their time.”
“But…” Her brows furrowed. “Surely, it didn’t matter anymore...?”
“It mattered to you.” Nick brushed the back of his fingers across her cheek in a gentle gesture. “I wanted you to know that you didn’t fail. That’s why I haven’t been around. I’ve been busting my gut at Constantine Motors to hit the profit target.” He dug in the front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a small velvet box. “Present number two. It’s not about the business anymore, or my father’s will. It’s only about you and me.”
With trembling hands, Crimson flipped open the lid. Her heart seemed to stop when she saw what was inside—a ring with three stones embedded in a wide band of rich, yellow gold. The middle stone was bright red and the smaller stones flanking it looked like diamonds.
“I wanted something you can wear all the time,” Nick explained. “Even in the factory, or when you have to put on gloves. That’s why I didn’t pick a stone in a raised setting.”
“Is this what I think it is?”
“It’s not an engagement ring.”
“Oh?” Her head snapped up.
A wry smile tugged at Nick’s mouth. “I’ve been engaged once. Didn’t like it much. I want to skip the engagement stage and go straight to the wedding. Call it a wengagement ring, all in one.”
“You want to marry me?” She frowned at him. “But you don’t need to…”
He contemplated her in silence, then spoke in a low voice. “I think I fell in love with you when I saw you dance on the boardroom table. It just took me a while to accept the idea. And I was prepared to throw away a hundred and fifty million dollars to make sure that you never had to doubt that I married you for any other reason but love.”
Crimson hesitated, found the courage to reply with equal candor. “Before I met you, I used to daydream about you because I’d heard so much about you from your father. It scared me to discover that reality was better than make-believe.”
He raised a confident brow. “So, it’s a yes?”
“Yes,” she told him, and her heart lurched into motion again, a mad gallop fuelled by relief and happiness and a sense of homecoming. But a small, ugly fang of jealousy cut into her joy as words she didn’t even know she remembered whispered through her mind.
Four carats of marquis cut diamond. For Marcela. Her stone could not be more than a carat, and it looked like a garnet. A cheap stone. Esmeralda had a necklace of garnets, a whole string of them.
“What’s the red stone?” she asked, striving for a casual tone.
“It’s a red diamond. Very rare. Very expensive. Try not to lose it.”
Alarmed now, she studied the ring. “How expensive?”
“I’ll give you a hint. Red diamonds cost at least fifty times more than white ones. Roughly a million bucks a carat. But I wanted a crimson stone for you. Which brings us to present number three.”
He dug once more in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a key. “You need a car. The guys in the factory made you Crimson Spur. Black and red. It’s their way of showing how much they respect you. It’s parked outside. Let’s go and try it out.”
Emotions bombarded Crimson. To find a something solid, something to ground her in reality, she homed in on the mundane. “I haven’t passed my driving test yet.”
Nick grinned. “I’ll drive. Put on a dress, something loose and flimsy. And get lots of warm blankets. We’ll go out to the shore and park on a bluff over the ocean, with fantastic views and total privacy.”
“Why?” Crimson asked. “It’s freezing out there.”
Nick hauled her into his arms, kissed the tip of her nose, and bent to whisper into her ear. “Rumor has it that you’ve never had sex in a car.”
Back to Contents
Epilogue
Crimson waddled up the front steps, both hands supporting her bulging belly. According to her obstetrician, at five months some slender women hardly showed at all. Some of them ballooned. She’d become a bloody zeppelin. At least she had stopped being sick. And wanting sardines and ice cream. At the same time. Whose idea had been to call it morning sickness, anyway? It should have been called twenty-four-hours-a-day sickness.
“I’m home,” she called out. It was a cue for Myrna and Esmeralda to reveal their whereabouts, so she could approach them, or avoid them, as the mood struck.
“In here, honey.”
Crimson followed her mother’s voice into the dining room. On the table stood two half-finished dolls’ houses. The blasted things were taking over the place. Nick was there too, stuffing his face with leftover chocolate cake. Excellent. She could play the crowd.
“I have great news,” she announced.
Nick licked a morsel a chocolate from the corner of his mouth. Something curled low in Crimson’s belly. What was it about him? Even in her zeppelin state, he could render her to a quivering mass of lust. He did it again, tongue leisurely sweeping along his bottom lip. She noticed the gleam in his eyes and realized he was doing it on purpose. She’d get him for that…later.
“You passed your driving test?” he suggested in all innocence.
Her gaze narrowed on him. Was it a genuine question? No, she guessed. Nick was trying not to smile. He already knew the answer and was teasing her. She’d get him for that, too.
“Almost,” she told him. “I’m told I’ll benefit from some further practice.”
“So, what’s the good news?” he asked.
She patted her bump meaningfully.
Nick’s dark brows drew together. “The baby?”
“My grandson?” Myrna said.
“My granddaughter,” Esmeralda corrected.
“Well…” Crimson drew it out, enjoying the moment. “When there are two grandmothers who are likely to render the poor child dizzy by tossing it between them every five minutes, both wanting to hold it all the time, what does a clever woman do?”
“Throw the grandmothers out?” Nick said in a hopeful tone.
“Allocates time slots,” Esmeralda said. “Like they do in the tax office.”
Myrna merely stared at Crimson’s bump. The sharp look from the cool, blue eyes suggested to Crimson that if she didn’t hurry up, her mother-in-law might steal her thunder.
Nick, of course, already knew. They had known since her first ultrasound at eight weeks, but she had wanted to keep it a secret until she discovered the sex of the babies at her twenty-week scan.
Crimson beamed all around “Well, she has two, of course. One for each.”
“Twins?” Myrna said.
Crimson gave a happy nod. “A boy and a girl.”
Esmeralda clapped her hands. “My granddaughter.”
Myrna clasped the pearls around her neck and spoke dreamily. “My grandson.”
Nick bounce
d up from his lazy slouch and walked up to her. “My clever wife,” he said. “The most amazing woman in the world. How do you do it? Always give everyone what they want? I’ve never known anyone who is so good at everything. I’m sure you’ll ace the driving test next time.”
While Nick murmured away in that soft sugary, let-me-adore-you voice, he hauled her into his arms, and Crimson felt herself melt. She’d never expected Nick to have the knack of talking sweet nonsense, telling a woman that everything was wonderful, even when they both knew it wasn’t. But somehow, somewhere, around the time they got married in January, he’d picked up the skill, as if he’d put some effort into it. She should ask him about it.
Then he kissed her.
And she promptly forgot what she’d planned to ask.
THE END
About the Author:
Tatiana March studied economics and enjoyed a successful career as a finance director in several international corporations. Now a full time writer, Tatiana lives in the UK near the river Thames with her boyfriend of more than two decades. No kids, no pets, apart from spiders and other forms of wildlife seeking temporary shelter.
You can read more about Tatiana and her books on her blog
www.tatianamarch.blogspot.co.uk
Tatiana loves to hear from readers. You can contact her at
[email protected]
****
Other books by Tatiana March
Contemporary Romance
Project Seduction
Trouble with the Law
Home for a Soldier
Le PACS
Learning to Forgive
Lies and Consequences
How Cat Got a Life
Reckless Encounter
Rugged
Sing That Song for Me
Trading Favors
Cosmic Forces
Woman Trap
Ballet Shoes and Engine Grease Page 20
