Secret Millionaire

by Kitty Alexander

  ‘Of course,’ said Tony. ‘Penelope’s over there, by the buffet. The tall lady in the blue dress.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He had to get away from here. And not just from this party, but from home too. He’d go abroad, visit some of the Eastern European countries he was considering expanding into. Anywhere where he didn’t have to see the woman he loved wearing that fool’s engagement ring. For he did love her, he knew that now. For all the good the knowledge did him.

  * * * * *

  ‘Oh my God,’ Alexia breathed. She had a hand up to her face, and she was staring at her father in horror. ‘He’s my brother, isn’t he? Chris is my brother.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.’

  ‘But there is a chance he could be, isn’t there?’ she challenged him, and the way his eyes dropped told her what she wanted to know.

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  It was like a living nightmare – she just couldn’t take it in. As if in slow motion, her life flashed before her eyes. Her and Chris, sharing their first kiss. Her, waiting impatiently for Chris to come home from university. Both of them sensing her father’s disapproval and keeping their burgeoning relationship a secret from him.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said again, and at last her father turned to her.

  ‘Look, as I said, I don’t think for a moment that Chris is my son, not really. For one thing, he’s so weak – only a weak man would have made the choice he made five years ago. He took my money, and he accepted my terms. And now he’s back, wanting more because he’s made a mess of things and his business is on the rocks. That’s why I was confident he’d track you down – to try to curry my favour.’

  She looked back at him with complete dislike. How very cowardly he was, paying Chris off like that instead of facing up to the outcome of his affair. ‘Chris’ father was your best friend,’ she said the disgust she felt for him plain in her voice.

  He looked down into his whisky glass. ‘Yes, he was,’ he admitted.’ That’s true.’ Then he looked up to meet her gaze again, his expression defiant. ‘But don’t you judge me, Alexia, not until you’ve experienced love like that – a love so strong it’s like a hand ripping your guts out every time you can’t be together. That’s what I felt for Mary. I adored her.’

  As she listened to his shaking voice, Alexia knew she had experienced a love like that. Not with Chris, because her father was right. A marriage between them would never have worked. But Mark... She didn’t know how she was going to get through the next week, working close to him, having to see him all the time.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. Desperate for her father not to see them, she went over to the window.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave Mum if you felt that way?’ Angrily, she wiped her tears away with the backs of her hands and turned to face him again, wanting suddenly to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. ‘We’d have managed very well without you!’

  ‘I never stopped loving your mother,’ he said. ‘What she and I had was just different, that’s all. And there was you, Alexia. Believe what you like, but I didn’t want to break up your home.’

  She ignored that. ‘Did Mum know? Does she know now?’

  Once again, he looked down, avoiding her gaze. ‘I’m not sure; I don’t think so. Besides, Mary took the decision out of my hands. When she found out she was pregnant, she told me it was over between us. Then, as you know, she died giving birth to Chris. I… was devastated.’

  ‘It’s all so sad,’ she said after a while, but she wasn’t thinking about Chris or her parents or even of Mary dying so prematurely. She was thinking about Mark and how the events of the past had made it so hard for her to trust anyone, even herself. Especially herself. As soon as she’d started to feel something for Mark, she’d expected things to go wrong. And they had.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is sad.’ He straightened his shoulders, pulling himself together. ‘But now you know the truth. I ought to have told you a long time ago, I suppose; I just hoped you’d realise Chris wasn’t right for you by yourself. I hope very much that we can move on from this now. I don’t want you to disappear again. I want to be a part of your life.’

  She knew it had cost him a great deal to say that to her. She also knew it was much too soon for her to respond. Right now she felt she hated him.

  He was looking at her, accurately reading her thoughts, and just for a moment, she saw a flicker of hurt in his eyes. They could never be close, the two of them, not like other fathers and daughters were. He had behaved diabolically, even though, in his own twisted way, he believed he had been doing what he thought was best for her.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door, and her mother came in, smiling cautiously. ‘How are things going?’

  Alexia stood up, a flush rising to her face.

  Very quickly her father went over to his wife and kissed her on the cheek. ‘We’re fine,’ he said, turning to look challenging in Alexia’s direction with one arm around Penelope. ‘Aren’t we, Alexia?’

  Alexia realized that unless she hurt her mother, she was always going to have to deceive her. He had put her in that position, and now he was waiting for her assurance that she wouldn’t cause any trouble.

  But she wouldn’t let him off so lightly. Not this time. She wasn’t going to make him any promises. ‘We’ve done some talking,’ she said with a brittle smile. ‘And now we’d better join your lovely party, Mum.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Penelope, looking uncertainly from one to another of them. Then she said, ‘Oh, Kenneth, darling, Mark Brown is here from MB Logistics. He has to leave soon though. I thought you’d like to speak to him?’

  Alexia halted in her tracks. Mark? Mark was here?

  ‘Yes, thanks, darling,’ her father was saying. ‘Yes, I definitely want to catch him.’

  And he strode from the room, leaving Alexia and her mother to follow in his wake.

  ‘Mark!’ she heard him say soon afterwards, and emerging from the office, she saw her father moving towards someone, his hand outstretched. And it was, unmistakably, her Mark Brown.

  Suddenly someone else was at her side, clutching at her hand. ‘Alexia,’ a familiar voice was saying. Chris. His arm crept around her shoulders possessively, and for a moment she looked into his face, searching for some family resemblance. But then she looked away again, quickly disentangling herself. There would be time for that later. Right now, she had more important things to do.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said, moving purposefully towards Mark. ‘I need to borrow Mark for a moment.’

  Her father looked at her, startled. ‘But I have important things to talk to Mr Brown about,’ he said.

  Taking her courage in her hands, Alexia turned her back on him to look into Mark’s face. ‘Not so important as the things I have to talk to him about,’ she said. ‘If that’s okay with you, Mark?’

  Time seem to stand still. She remembered the look on his face in the sunset in the moment before she’d walked away. How very stupid she’d been to allow the hurts of the past to get in the way of what she felt for him. How devastated she would be if he didn’t give her a chance to explain now.

  ‘Alexia,’ said her father in the authoritarian voice he’d so often used towards her in the past. ‘I don’t think Mr Brown wants – ’

  ‘Excuse me, Kenneth,’ said Mark, placing his hand on top of hers, where it lay on his arm. ‘Alexia’s right. We do have important things to discuss. Good evening.’

  And he led her away from the party.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They didn’t speak as they walked away from the house. Alexia’s heart was thumping in her chest. She had to get this right – she was only going to get one shot at this. God, but she was so tired. The evening had already been a roller coaster of emotion. She wanted to sleep for a thousand years. But only if she could sleep curled up with Mark, with every particle of her body in contact with his.

  When he sto
pped under one of the illuminated trees, looking down at her, she swayed towards him, her arms still wrapped around herself, until her face was in contact with his chest.

  Mark reached out to hold her, his touch so light she could barely feel it. ‘I can’t …’ he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. ‘I can’t do this when I know you’re going to be with him.’

  Alexia looked up, not having any idea what he was talking about.

  ‘Chris,’ he told her. ‘You’re getting married to Chris. Isn’t that what you brought me out here to tell me?’

  She shook her head, horrified. ‘No!’ she said, ‘I’m not marrying Chris. I was, five years ago, but my father … my father persuaded him to call it off. Then he turned up the other day to tell me my father was dying, so I agreed to come here tonight. But it turns out that was all lies, and my father isn’t dying at all. Chris just –’

  Mark held up his hand. ‘Shh, Alexia, I need you to go slower,’ he said. ‘I need to know whether I can begin to let myself feel happy or not.’

  She sighed – a heavy, shuddering sigh that shed five years of bitterness and misunderstanding, like an unwanted, unneeded skin. ‘That all depends,’ she said, ‘on what will make you happy.’

  His grip on her tightened until she could feel it properly. ‘You,’ he told her simply. ‘You, without suspicion, without guilt and without misunderstandings. You.’

  Tears began to spill down her face. ‘A few days ago,’ she said, ‘maybe even a few hours ago, I would have told you that just wasn’t possible,’ she said. ‘But now …. Be happy, Mark. Dare to be happy.’

  He reached out to touch her face. ‘You’re crying,’ he said, still looking troubled.

  ‘Just ignore it,’ she said, reaching up to kiss him.

  A long, dizzy moment later, she pulled back to look at him. His eyes glowed at her, smoky with passion. She felt an answering tug in her body. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

  ‘What about your father’s party?’ he asked.

  Stuff it! She wanted to say, but that would require some explanation, and she didn’t want to waste any time speaking about her father right now. ‘He’ll understand,’ she said quickly. And perhaps it was true anyway. After all, he’d been the one to speak so eloquently about a love that was like a hand pulling your guts out.

  Shortly afterwards, purring along in Mark’s car, Alexia’s body tingled. She didn’t feel tired anymore. Not even by the prospect of driving back all this way tomorrow to collect the work’s van, still parked outside her parents’ house. In fact, she’d never felt more alive in her life. Which was just as well, because she knew there would be plenty more emotion to come tonight as she tried to explain everything to Mark.

  Taking a deep breath, she plunged in. ‘I need to tell you something,’ she said. ‘About what happened to me five years ago.’

  And so she told him it all – everything, including what she’d learnt that evening about her father and about Chris.

  ‘My God,’ said Mark after he’d heard it all, just as she had done.

  ‘At the time, my father wouldn’t discuss it with me,’ she said. ‘Not properly. He just kept on insisting that I’d be grateful to him one day; that Chris wasn’t good enough for me.’

  ‘So you left?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alexia remembered her mother’s tears. The few bleak weeks she’d spent sleeping on friends’ sofas before she’d taken the decision to move to a new city. The loneliness and despair she’d experienced as she set about building a new life for herself.

  ‘You’ve done so well, Alexia,’ Mark told her now.

  Had she? She had a home and a job she loved. She’d made lots of new friends, and there was always someone to go out with in the evening – to the cinema, or for a meal or a drink.

  ‘I’ve kept myself busy so that I haven’t had time to think,’ she said, fully realising it for the first time. ‘Scratch the surface, and that heartbroken, lonely girl has probably always been there. I’m sorry. It’s all made it very difficult for me to trust anybody.’

  ‘We’re not so very different,’ Mark told her. ‘I of all people know what it’s like to have the past make such a claim on you. But I can promise you this; you’re never going to be lonely again. And when we get back, I’m going to prove it to you.’

  * * * * *

  The moon was still out, sending golden light into the top room and turning Alexia’s abandoned dress into a floating pool. Reluctantly, not wanting to spoil the atmosphere of deep contentment, Mark thought of their walk at Ladybower and its hurtful, confusing conclusion.

  We should probably have talked more before we made love, he thought. But after Alexia had told him the story of Chris’s abandonment and her father’s manipulation of her, he’d begun to understand what she’d been through. If he and Alexia were to have a future together, then no doubt Mark would meet her father occasionally. How could a man behave like that towards his own daughter? And to his wife? Dislike Chris as he did, a part of him almost felt sorry for him, too. Kenneth Bright was utterly ruthless. It was just as well he was stepping down from his company, or Mark would have put a stop to the haulage deal immediately.

  But perhaps Kenneth Bright had learnt his lesson now? That openness and honesty about one’s feelings and actions was of paramount importance?

  He’d certainly learnt that himself. Though he still needed to talk to Alexia about it. In the car last night, need and desire had prickled between them like static the closer they’d got to home. The second they got back, they’d headed for the house in silent, mutual consent, holding hands as they went up stairs. And once they were in the top room, they surrendered hungrily to their passion, lips plundering, fingers searching for zips and buttons.

  Mark had never known passion like it, and he wanted to experience it all over again. But he knew he mustn’t, not just yet. Last night, Alexia had talked. Now it was his turn. It was time for him to accept that a life of hiding away from love, from pain, from truth just wasn’t possible any longer now that Alexia was a part of him. Loving her was a risk worth taking a million times over.

  ‘So,’ he said now, with a lightness he didn’t feel. ‘This is beyond nice. And I must admit, after the other night, I never thought we’d be like this again.’

  He heard her sigh. ‘I’m sorry. It was just that … when you thought I could be the kind of person who made love to you when I was actually with somebody else, I … well, I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Hell, I didn’t want to believe it of you. I couldn’t believe it of you. But I had what I thought was the evidence of my own eyes. Now I know things aren’t always what they seem.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘They’re not. When you didn’t show up after our night together, I thought you’d just used me. And when it turned out that you’d lied to me all along about who you were, I just couldn’t take it. All these years I’ve seen what Dad did to me as a betrayal. Honesty has been everything to me. I’ve become very black or white about it.’ She paused, then smiled at him. ‘Until Bert broke that planter, anyway …’

  Mark laughed, hugging her closer. ‘Bert…’ he said. ‘I am so glad he’s going to still be a part of our lives. That man is a great leveller.’

  ‘He is,’ she smiled.

  There was silence for a moment, then he took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I know it’s pathetic to admit it at the age of thirty-six, but my view of love is still coloured by my parents’ stormy and ultimately doomed marriage.’

  Mark felt a muscle in the side of his face flicker. He wondered when he’d ever felt more vulnerable, and was grateful when he felt Alexia’s cheek nestle into his shoulder. ‘My father was constantly and openly unfaithful to my mother. As a boy, I was shunted backwards and forwards between them after they divorced. Then, later, when I saw the hell Jonathan went through when his own marriage broke up…’

  ‘It made you reluctant to get involved yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned
to look at her, his eyes imploring her to understand. ‘Alexia, I work such long hours most of the time, and that’s a pressure on any relationship.’

  She smiled, stabbing him in the chest with her index finger. ‘Mark, you’re the kind of guy who takes days off to rotivate a vegetable patch,’ she reminded him. ‘The kind of guy who sees to his dog’s needs, even if that does mean bathing him because he’s rolled in something foul.’

  It was true – he had been that type of guy lately. ‘I can’t always be like that,’ he said, but even as he spoke, he wondered if it were strictly true. His company was successful, and he employed a good staff. Perhaps it was time to start delegating more.

  ‘I’m trying to explain to you why I didn’t ask you about Chris that time; why I just assumed the worst.’

  She looked at him, and the expression in her eyes made his heart turn over. He groaned, moving in to kiss her thoroughly. When he finally allowed her to come up for air she said, ‘We’re both very messed up, aren’t we?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Very.’

  ‘I’ll put up with your neuroses if you put up with mine,’ she said, and he laughed.

  ‘That’s hardly the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,’ he said. ‘But deal.’

  Good job, pal! Mark seemed to hear Jonathan say inside his head. Good job!

  ‘Are you thinking about Jonathan?’ she asked.

  Would she always be able to read him so accurately? ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I could have met him.’

  Tears welled up in his throat. ‘I wish you could have too. He would have been crazy about you.’

  Alexia reached out to draw him closer, and he kissed her, re-igniting their passion and driving away his tears. Later, much later, she looked him in the face. ‘Somehow, I think Jonathan knows about us,’ she said. ‘I think he knows you’re happy.’

  Mark smiled, wondering that it was possible to feel so much and not burst with the joy of it. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘I think you’re right.’