by Jan Colley
Lots of calls. The word had gotten out that Stewart Cooper was the principal investor in Thorne-Hadlow Investments. That started an avalanche of interest from some of the country’s wealthiest business icons, clamoring to be included. The fledgling company’s projected equity would far surpass their initial estimates at this rate, proving Adam’s instincts about how vital Stewart’s credentials would be correct.
“Promotion for the launch…” John said, rifling through his notes. “Everything is in hand, thanks to Lettie here.” He indicated the bespectacled young lady beside him. “You’re going down to sign the contract and pay the deposit on the venue today, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “As soon as we’re finished here. Have you finalized the guest list numbers?”
This would be a smallish but classy event at one of London’s most prestigious clubs. Adam guessed that many of those who’d accepted personal invites to the launch were only coming in the hope of catching a glimpse of the notorious Stewart Cooper. They would be disappointed. The former pop-star manager hadn’t been seen in public for a decade or more and Adam was fairly sure he wouldn’t make an exception for Thorne-Hadlow.
He’d also invited Jasmine—a gesture of apology for his churlishness a week ago. Of thanks for her intervention with her uncle.
Of just plain wanting to see her face, hear her voice. Touch her, anywhere and everywhere.
“I have the reporter from the Mail here any minute for a bit of promo. Be prepared to have your photo taken.”
Adam grimaced. “The offices are a mess.” There were furniture boxes everywhere, his people sat at desks with wiring all over the place and no phones, and the entrance on the ground floor was wide-open. “Where is that security company?”
“I’ll call them before I go,” Lettie said, rising.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” John grinned at him. “Things will fall into place. They always do, with you on the job.”
Adam grunted and watched his friend leave. It was nice to be given credit but it was primarily John’s belief in Adam’s ability to attract investment that had got them this far. Just a few short months ago, a lot of the big players they approached had run the other way. He owed John for keeping the faith.
He owed Jasmine, too. Without her, he doubted her uncle would have been interested. Once the launch was over and things started to settle down a little, he would give her a call. He’d hate her to return to New Zealand thinking badly of him.
He stood at his office window, looking out over the white disc of the O2 Dome in the distance, and finally allowed himself to acknowledge that he missed her. He’d lashed out because she hurt his pride and he wasn’t used to that from anyone. Subsequently, he’d taken her slight far more seriously than it warranted.
A deep, booming voice broke into his thoughts, followed by John’s voice, surprised and inquiring. Adam turned just as Stewart Cooper himself marched into his office with John on his heels.
The man who never left his house in the Lake District, a virtual recluse, shunned by his family and denied his birthright, stood framed in Adam’s doorway. And he did not look pleased to be here.
Adam moved to meet him but didn’t smile. He was obviously in no mood for pleasantries. Adam thought again how frail Jasmine’s younger, taller father looked in comparison to the physically powerful man approaching him now.
Stewart stopped at the desk, his legs braced like a fighter, and fixed Adam with a glower. “I came to tell you that if you marry my niece before her father dies, the deal is off.”
Adam’s vision deserted him for a second. He bit down on a howl of protest that lodged in his throat, and then unclenched his fists. Who the hell did this bloke think he was to demand whom he could or could not marry? If he thought that was the way Adam did business, he had another think coming.
Behind the big man, John’s mouth dropped open. Adam ignored him, fuming inwardly. Damn, but this woman and her secrets were proving to be a monumental pain in the rear. He’d like to go just half a day without thinking about her.
“Well?”
Adam forced his mind on the facts and away from Jasmine’s face. He recalled her saying her father needed a male heir to pass the estate on to. If that didn’t eventuate, presumably the estate would go to Stewart, the next of kin. Bloody family feuds! His own family had just been through the wringer in New Zealand because of a stupid historical feud. Didn’t people have anything better to do with their time?
Stewart Cooper and John still waited expectantly. Adam’s good business sense kicked in. The word no was his least favorite word in the world but Stewart was a vital link to their success. Without his money, and more importantly, his involvement, Thorne-Hadlow would be just one more angel investment company. John and Adam weren’t interested in small businesses; they were playing with millions of pounds to start up innovative companies that were going global. And marketing and management for global IT and technology required massive investment—and massive risk.
The big Englishman watched him through cold gray eyes that had similar color to his niece’s but none of the life. “I’m waiting for an assurance from you that this engagement won’t proceed.”
How had he found out? Surely Jasmine had told her father by now it was all an act.
John moved into view behind the bulk of their visitor. Adam squared up to his task. If he ordered him out, he’d be wasting five years of planning and hard work, not to mention the fortune that he personally had sunk into this project. He had John to consider, one of life’s good blokes with two young kids and a large mortgage. And for what? A pretend engagement that she—Jasmine—had instigated?
Besides which, hadn’t she dumped him last week?
Adam cleared his throat. “The engagement is off, Stewart. I won’t be marrying your niece.”
Stewart’s piercing eyes bored into him for a few seconds more then he snapped off a nod. “Good man. Nothing personal, you understand.”
His entire demeanor changed in an instant and he became the affable man Adam had met at his home last week on his return from Vienna. “My lawyer will be in touch in the next day or so.” He shook hands heartily with both of them. “Boys.” And was gone, as unexpectedly as he had come.
“You were engaged?” John turned to him, looking mystified.
“Long story,” Adam said, shaking his head.
He told himself he had done the only thing he could have under the circumstances, but a hollow feeling of distaste perplexed him. It was as if he’d dishonored her by going along with her uncle’s preposterous demand. Which was ridiculous. Jasmine would not want his business undermined. And there was no engagement. It wasn’t as if they’d announced the union anyway. Only her father and Gill knew about it, and maybe Ian. Anyway, she would have set them all right by now, and Stewart was certainly not going to open his mouth about this conversation.
Realizing he wasn’t going to get an explanation from his partner, John looked at his watch, frowning. “Where’s that bloody reporter?”
Left alone, Adam ordered himself to stop worrying about Jasmine and get back to trying to track down the phone people.
The phone began to ring at seven in the morning. Jasmine jerked awake as her father’s booming displeasure seemed to reach every corner of the house, taking her back to the Vincent debacle before his illness. The return of his voice at top notch was not a good sign.
She hurried into the small yellow drawing room where her father spent most of his days, wrinkling her nose against the smell of sickness that was beginning to pervade the room.
Her father was agitatedly pushing newspapers all over the table when he looked up and saw her. “Here she is,” he erupted. “My infamous daughter.”
Jasmine’s heart plummeted. What had she done to disappoint him now?
His anger at her for approaching his most hated enemy had abated only slightly since she’d told him the engagement between her and Adam was off. He behaved exactly as she’d expected and spent ever
y minute lauding Ian’s virtues.
Now, he tossed one of the newspapers across the table to where she stood. Jasmine looked down. “Poor Jane Dumped—Again!”
“Try another,” her father said acidly, tossing more papers. “And another.”
She closed her eyes briefly, her shoulders slumping. My worst nightmare…
Taking a shaky breath, she forced herself to open her eyes.
“The Heiress and the Playboy—History Repeats.” She winced at the next one—“Poor Little Jane—Abandoned Again” while Gill shushed her father at the other end of the table.
Trembling, she sank into the nearest chair as the words on the newsprint swam in front of her eyes. Her father vigorously filled her in, saying that Adam had indeed humiliated her, humiliated all of them. Her uncle had threatened to ditch his investment if Adam didn’t ditch her. And ditch her he had in double-quick time.
She barely heard her father’s “I told you so”s as her mind sank into anguish and her heart with it. It was happening again. She didn’t know if she could bear it. She’d angered Adam with her clumsy farewell and shouldn’t have been surprised by any callous disregard for her feelings. But why choose the public arena? He must have known how scarred she was by her past, the lengths she’d gone to to get away from all this.
I think you’re running away, he’d said in Vienna.
“When will you learn,” her father lamented, “that love is for fools? Anyone with half a brain knows that.”
Predictably, he started up about Ian again as she sat numb with shock. How Ian would never let her down, he would protect her from all of this. Finally, her stepmother persuaded him to subside and he left the room, muttering that Jasmine was as bad as her mother.
Gill sat down beside her and flicked her fingers over the papers. “Take this with a grain of salt, love. It states ‘unnamed sources.’ I bet no one even spoke to Adam, or they misheard or misunderstood and didn’t bother to confirm it with him.”
She nodded slowly, thinking that cautious hope was better than no hope, even if it wouldn’t change the outcome. Perhaps he hadn’t knowingly humiliated her. He could be hard, but cruel? She refused to believe she could have lost her heart to a cruel man.
Remember Vincent, her memory taunted her…
She leaned her head back on the chair and stared, unseeing, out the window, waiting for the pain to come and clamp her insides with rusty jaws. “I suppose you think I should marry Ian, too,” she whispered.
Gill squeezed her arm, kept her hands there. “There’s a lot to be said for compatibility, security.”
Jasmine stared at her for seconds, finally seeing what she’d been blind to all these years. She grabbed on to it—anything to sway her mind from her own humiliation. “You don’t love my father, do you?”
Sir Nigel never displayed affection, except perhaps to his horses, and she’d wondered if he was even capable of love. But she’d always assumed Gill saw something in him to admire. Surely they must share some kind of bond to stay together all these years.
Gill’s eyes showed gentle understanding. “I married for love first time around. He left me. When I came here, I recognized that Nigel and I could be of use to each other. I could bring you up properly and manage some of the workload around here. In return, he would give me security, prestige, a little luxury.” She smiled, and Jasmine’s heart squeezed. “And I got to have you, honey, to watch you grow. That alone was worth the price of admission.”
A tear rolled down Jasmine’s cheek and Gill, wonderful comforting Gill, reached out and wiped it away. “He’s not a bad man. He was terribly hurt by your mother and in his way, he doesn’t want to see you hurt.”
Too late, Jasmine thought. Still, there was no need to worry anymore. Her heart was dead to the possibility of love now.
All through that long day, unable to stop herself, she tracked the progress of the story on Internet sites and TV. On signing into her work e-mail address, she was dismayed to find the story breaking on the main New Zealand news page because of her Kiwi connection. It was the middle of the night there but she imagined her boss, her work colleagues, the one or two friends she had warmed enough toward to share a coffee with occasionally, all waking up to the news that she was not who she purported to be. The real Jane Cooper was so much more interesting than the efficient, reserved Jasmine.
It was all laid out in grotesque clarity: her mother’s affair with Stewart, the questions around her dead brother’s paternity, the car accident, abandonment and her later broken engagement. “Misplacing one fiancé was unlucky,” one scribe gleefully proclaimed. “Losing two is careless.”
Whatever Adam’s part in the story, her uncle’s actions had wounded her. She thought they’d connected in some way, felt he wanted to expand on that. But it appeared Stewart was just after the estate and his revenge.
Ian came around, but she did not want to see him and Gill sent him away. The phone didn’t stop ringing. The story, even with no fresh legs to run with, seemed to stutter on: inane comments from anyone who might have known her at school, staff at her mother’s psychiatric facility, even a couple of locals that had attended the Boxing Day party and who looked thrilled to find themselves being interviewed on television.
Jasmine knew one thing. She couldn’t go back to New Zealand and face Nick and her colleagues. With a heavy heart, she composed and sent e-mails to him and to an international moving company to pack up her house.
Gill showed Adam into one of the unused rooms, where he found Jasmine unpacking some of the estate’s forgotten antiques. From the look on her stepmother’s face, he wasn’t the most popular man in Britain at the moment. The atmosphere in the house was ghost-cold.
He found Jasmine sitting in the middle of a ring of chests and boxes, with piles of packing foam and wood chips scattered around. She held a small, square silver object in her hands and was carefully turning it this way and that. She wore a black cowl-necked jumper over gray pants and both garments were liberally spotted with packing debris and dust.
When she heard his approach, she looked straight at him, her sharp inhalation straightening her back. Adam stood still, stunned at the pain reflected in her eyes. Hating the knowledge that he’d put it there.
She finally looked back at her prize. “Solid silver card case, Victorian, early eighteen-fifties. Made by Alfred Taylor, a silversmith of Birmingham.”
She carefully put the case into an open box.
Adam stepped forward quickly. “What can I do?”
Her blink of surprise at his concern shamed him. Did she really think he was that callous?
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said quietly. “It will be worse if anyone sees you.”
There was no censure in her voice or her eyes, but Adam needed to tell her it wasn’t intentional, he hadn’t seen it coming. “We had a reporter coming to the offices for some promo for the launch. I suspect he saw Stewart coming in, decided to eavesdrop, and then disappeared.”
With the reception area in a state and Lettie out anyway, no one had noticed anyone lurking outside Adam’s office while the conversation with Stewart took place. There were so many publications doing the rounds, they couldn’t be sure of the original source. The fact that the reporter supposedly covering the launch hadn’t shown for his appointment suggested he was the culprit, but there was no way the editor was admitting to anything. “I knew nothing about it until I saw it in the papers.”
The guarded acceptance in her eyes made him feel worse, if that was possible. The weight of culpability with each new publication or Internet site or TV broadcast was heavy indeed. How could he have exposed her to this? He knew what it had cost her in the past. No matter how miffed he was at her dumping him, he wouldn’t have wished this particular personal nightmare on her if she was his worst enemy, because he knew how far she’d run to put it behind her last time.
Jasmine picked up a lumpy object and began peeling back layers of Bubble Wrap. Adam paced, not looking at her, bu
t so aware of every move she made, the way she bent her head to study the object—some sort of bronze cannon—her concentration so intense, he knew she wasn’t seeing it at all. All her senses were on him.
Suddenly he whirled and squatted down in front of her. He rested his hands on her knees. “Marry me.”
Jasmine nearly dropped the cannon. “Wh-what?”
“I can’t change what’s happened but I can make things better.”
Her gray-blue eyes had a rosy tinge in the dimly lit room, suggesting recent tears.
“How?” she asked. “How could marrying you make it better?”
Adam sighed. Maybe it couldn’t, but he felt so useless. “I wouldn’t be abandoning you.” He squeezed her thighs, not sure which of them he was trying to convince more.
“You’ve been talking to Nick.” There was an accusatory tone in her voice.
Adam didn’t deny it. Both his brother and father had called to castigate him as soon as the story broke over there. They’d taken turns to berate him for his lack of responsibility, his carelessness in hurting a fine woman like Jasmine. When would he learn he couldn’t just continue to sail through life, letting people down, never thinking of consequences? Adam had been lucky to escape with his hearing.
They had some valid points. He should have taken more care with Jasmine’s particular set of circumstances. His brother would never have gotten into this situation, but if he had, he would take full responsibility.
“We might be all right. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
They were. Not only that, but the sex was amazing. Many marriages survived on less.
“And when my uncle finds out you’ve gone back on your word? Your business?”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. That had kept him awake all night, but he’d contributed to this mess. He had to clean it up. “I don’t think it will come to that, but that’s my problem.”
