‘You sound tired,’ she said. ‘Tough fight?’
‘No, it was over in a flash. But I found out that the guy I chased down today bullshitted me, and that pisses me off.’
‘How?’
‘I believed him when he was lying.’
‘What did he lie about?’ she asked.
‘That there were only three of them at a poker game when there were more players.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I would think that was good news.’
His eyes opened though all he could see was darkness. ‘How could that be good news? He lied to me and I bought it.’
‘Except he lied for a reason. So maybe the other person at the poker table is the one who put out the bounty. You’re closer than you thought, tough guy. All you have to do is push that button one more time and you’ve got your answer.’
She did have a way of looking at things that made him feel better. ‘But the guy has split. I don’t know where he is.’
‘You’ll find him, or one of the other guys from the game, I have faith. You win every fight because you don’t give up, you’re smart and play your opponents by staying several moves ahead. You can do this, Dax, don’t feel sorry for yourself now. You’re close to the prize.’
‘And what’s the prize?’ he asked.
‘Me and my freedom, I’ll be a very grateful woman if you can swing that.’
‘Naked picture grateful?’
‘Maybe,’ she laughed. ‘Go to sleep. You need to rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
‘Ok.’
‘Love you.’
‘I love you too, Minx. Be good.’
Hanging up with her after such a short call, Dax rested the cell phone on his chest under his hands. Ivy had managed to turn around his thinking, and suddenly he was optimistic about the day ahead. He would get this guy, he was closer than ever.
Chapter Eighteen
Ivy hadn’t heard from Dax all day. Their middle of the night conversation had sent her into a blissful sleep, but she’d waited all day for word from him or for a visit and neither had happened. She had just washed the last of the dinner dishes and was considering going for another swim when the sound of spike heels on tile drew her around.
Rosie was staggering around the kitchen isle with her hands held high above her head. She spun around then gestured to her outfit. The short green dress was strapless and clung to Rosie’s curves, leaving nothing to the imagination.
‘What are you doing?’ Ivy asked, drying her hands.
‘I thought we could go out, you know, hit a few clubs.’
‘Why would we want to do that?’
‘It’s boring here, we’ve done everything that we can do and no offense but I want the kind of fun that you and Carina just can’t give me, you know?’
Carina had said she was going for a bath before Ivy started on the dishes. Rosie must have used that time to glam herself up, using every makeup brush in the pack from the looks of the layer of spackle on her face.
‘You want to get laid,’ Ivy exhaled. ‘I suppose that means you don’t have a fella?’
‘I have a few,’ Rosie laughed. ‘But as it happens, I’ve got a guy in LA, and he wants to see me tonight. I can’t pass that up, can I? Get changed and you can come out with us.’
‘I don’t want to go out,’ Ivy said, she still hadn’t told the other women about why she was here or what Dax was doing in the city that kept him away from their supposed vacation. ‘I want to stay here.’
‘Is Dax coming back tonight?’ Rosie asked, strutting over to the fridge.
She pulled out a bottle of wine and proceeded to pour herself a full tumbler of the liquid, she didn’t even look for the wine glasses that Ivy knew were there. But when you came from a background of having nothing, you drank out of whatever presented itself.
‘I don’t know, maybe.’
‘Call him, he can meet us at the club. I bet he’s a guy who likes to have a good time.’
Rosie gulped down the liquid then poured another glass, so Ivy went over to take the bottle away and put it back in the fridge. The only Dax she had seen in a club was one working security, he wasn’t the type to dance surrounded by others, or the type to get drunk out of his wits. She imagined that from his experiences with Trystan he was used to finding a suitable observation post and watching everyone else go wild rather than going wild himself.
‘Don’t get drunk,’ Ivy said to Rosie but they’d already had wine at dinner, so Rosie was on her way to tipsy.
‘Why not? Come on, it’s cheaper to drink here than the fortune they charge you in the clubs.’
Rosie tried to move Ivy aside, but she kept herself in front of the refrigerator. ‘I thought you said you had a guy, he’ll be paying for your drinks, won’t he?’
‘I guess,’ Rosie snorted. ‘He can afford it, he’s stinking rich.’
A guy with that amount of money would probably want his woman to conduct herself with a bit of class. A woman that he was serious about anyway. If he was just looking for a good time then Rosie was top of the bill, she could make a party come to life anywhere.
‘I don’t think that it’s a good idea to go into the city,’ she said, glancing at the clock. ‘It’s already almost ten, if the guy has to come and pick you up and then drive back out there then it will be after midnight by the time you get there. How much fun can you have at that time?’
‘Uh, loads!’ Rosie declared. ‘Anyway, he’s already on his way…’
‘What?’ she asked, snatching her sister’s slender wrist. ‘You invited a random guy out here to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night?’
She wasn’t sure if she should be more concerned about how Dax would react to that news or about this random man’s safety. If he drove up here expecting to pick up a date and was descended upon by Stark security he might not get out in one piece.
‘You’ve gotta test how eager they are,’ Rosie grinned. ‘If he’s willing to drive all the way out here to pick me up then he’s definitely interested.’
‘You have to call him back and tell him not to come here. No one is allowed out here. It’s not our house, we can’t invite other people to—‘
‘Dax won’t mind, he’s cool.’
Rosie and Dax had yet to have a conversation. Once again Rosie was making up rules to suit her needs. ‘I’m telling you that it’s not cool. Phone him, Rosie, I mean it. Did you think about consulting me or Carina? We don’t want a guy invading our space. Call him and tell him not to come or you’ll be invited to leave too.’
‘Uh, fine,’ Rosie tsked, wandering away from her sister. ‘You’re such a drag.’
‘I’m sorry, Rosie, but you can’t just invite a party here and expect the rest of us to deal.’
‘I’ll call him, but you’ve got to promise we’ll crank up the atmosphere here. Do you promise we’ll have our own party?’
‘I have to call Dax, but after that we can—‘
Rosie whooped. ‘Let’s have some fun! We’ll have some wine and play some music, does this place have a sound system?’
There was a sound system in the living room with state of the art speakers in every room and outside too, which could be individually controlled. But Ivy wasn’t going to tell her sister that.
‘I can’t believe that you’ve only been here a couple of days and you’re bored already.’
This was the recurring theme of her relationship with her sister who would much rather party than do most other things like have a civilised conversation or hold down a job. Though Ivy had lost her share of jobs too, maybe it was more than just bad luck, and somehow it was engrained in their DNA that they would get themselves into frequent trouble.
‘We’re in California! LA is full of hot guys loaded with cash! We’re wasting opportunities locking ourselves up out here. We could be in nightclubs, meeting people. Maybe we’d be discovered!’ Rosie gasped and began to sashay around the room. ‘Who would turn down a chance to be rich and famous?’
Ivy didn’t want to be the one to tell her sister that at the age of thirty-one she was a little too old to be discovered. Or more accurately that Rosie should be a little too old to fall for that line.
While Rosie amused herself by singing a dance tune and dancing around the dining table, Ivy finished cleaning up the kitchen. ‘Go and phone him,’ Ivy instructed.
Rosie didn’t miss a word of her song, she twirled her way out of the kitchen to the living room and Ivy was pleased to get peace, though she could still hear Rosie’s singing from the other room.
She was about to go upstairs and phone Dax when Carina came into the kitchen, dressed but still flushed from the heat of the bathroom.
‘She’s in a good mood,’ Carina said, wearing a grin. ‘Is she always so happy?’
‘Rosie is the queen of finding her happiness.’
‘I’m always impressed by people who manage to remain optimistic through their lives. We all have difficult times, but those don’t seem to have affected Rosie.’
It was an admirable quality, Rosie wouldn’t let anyone else alter her mood. Carina retrieved the wine from the fridge and held it up in an offering to Ivy, who shook her head. ‘Please carry on and enjoy it, I’m not much of a drinker.’
‘You’re teetotal?’ Carina asked, pouring wine into a wine glass that she obtained from the top shelf. ‘Forgive me for asking, but did you have a problem?’
‘With alcohol? No,’ Ivy said. Carina can’t have noticed the glass of wine she’d had at dinner. ‘I just… I have to call Dax before I go to bed, and I’d rather be clearheaded to do it.’
‘He doesn’t like you drinking? Does he direct a lot of your behaviour?’
‘You’re asking if he’s controlling?’ she asked, pouring herself a tall glass of orange juice then going outside to sit on the deck with Carina following just behind her.
Ivy put her glass on the glass-top table between two wicker chairs and her feet up on the matching footstool. Carina seated herself in the other chair and held her glass close to her chest in both hands.
‘I am curious about your relationship, you’re very close and both very secretive.’
‘Dax is a straightforward guy. His barriers are just higher with you because… he doesn’t want to get invested.’
‘Because I abandoned him once, he thinks that I’ll do it again. I can understand that. It’s difficult to accept your son rejecting you. He holes up in your bedroom and avoids me.’
Ivy wasn’t sure what Carina wanted from her or from Dax. She complained about Dax’s behaviour but made no excuses for her own.
‘You know, you haven’t made your intentions clear, and until you are honest with us, you’re unlikely to get any respect from us.’
‘Us? If I don’t have your respect, then I won’t have Dax’s?’
‘I think that I can be an ally, but I have to believe that you’ll be good for him. Soon, I’ll be leaving here, and I don’t trust you, so I won’t be arguing your case to Dax.’
‘You don’t trust me?’
‘When I’ve asked about your relationship with Bruno you tell me that you don’t want to talk about it. So why should I tell you about my relationship with Dax?’
Carina finished her wine then took a deep breath, the sound of the ocean filled the echoing silence between the women. ‘It’s been a long time since I thought about him and longer since I spoke of him.’
‘Bruno?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does that mean you haven’t thought about Dax?’ Ivy asked. Dax could have used a mother when he was growing up. If he hadn’t been abandoned by his parents so young then maybe he wouldn’t have been such an easy target for Mauri Stark.
‘I thought about him, but I thought he was with Ray.’ The man who Dax had thought was his father until Mauri revealed the truth of his parentage. ‘Bruno was… we were together for almost five years and for a long time we were happy, he took care of me and made sacrifices for me.’
‘The dream guy,’ Ivy said, hoping her disdain wasn’t too obvious.
‘Oh no, he had his vices and after the bloom came off the rose… we fought a lot, and he didn’t like it when I argued back… then the affairs started.’
‘He slept around?’
‘Bruno did what he wanted when he wanted. At first he made excuses but after a few months of enduring his flirtations he began to act like it was normal, and he expected me to put up with his behaviour without complaining. The sad part is that for a long time I did.’
‘Is that why you left him?’
‘I found out that I was pregnant, and it was when I came home to tell him that… I found him in bed with another woman.’ Which sounded like it was normal behaviour but from how Carina gazed out across the black ocean, which was lit by only the moon, something was different about this woman.
‘Who was it?’ Ivy asked.
‘Mauri’s wife, Winnie,’ she said, forcing herself to smile and turn to Ivy, but the glaze in her eyes betrayed how real the pain still was for her. Ivy’s jaw fell, and she wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that revelation. Dax had never spoken about Mauri’s wife, the mother of Brad and Trystan, from what Ivy did know the woman had been dead for a long time. ‘Mauri didn’t know, and of course I couldn’t tell him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Bruno warned me not to. He threatened me, and I had to agree to keep the secret, Bruno was so angry at me for catching them like I did. The funny thing was, he fought for her more than he fought for me or anyone else. He didn’t want his relationship with Mauri to change, but he also worried for her safety, for her wellbeing.’
‘Is that when you left?’
‘I struggled because I thought the baby would change things, it didn’t. I didn’t tell him about it right away, but when I did… he told me to get rid of it, to get rid of Dax… I couldn’t do that.’
‘Why did he want—‘
‘He wanted to keep seeing Mauri’s wife, but that was never going to work, she would never have left Mauri because he could offer her a life that Bruno couldn’t. If Mauri had discovered them… he’d have cast them both out, and neither of them wanted that.’
‘How did Bruno react when you refused to have the abortion?’
‘I didn’t,’ Carina said, lifting her eyes to the moon. ‘I knew how he would react, and I knew he would force me to do it. I took everything that I could, and I left, I never went back.’
‘That was… very brave of you,’ Ivy said. ‘You must have been scared.’
‘Before I was with Bruno I survived on my own for years. With a child it was… it was difficult and then I met Ray, and he was so good with Dax, they loved to spend time together. Dax was no more than a toddler when I met Ray, but they went everywhere together, they were like peas in a pod and… Ray made it look so easy.’
‘So you abandoned Dax? Why?’ Ivy’s sympathy for Carina waned when she considered whether she could walk away from her child, the child she had already sacrificed for before.
‘I… I don’t have an excuse. I was exhausted and… things weren’t working out with Ray, he loved Dax more than he loved me. I thought it was important for a boy to have a father, that he have that male influence. I had struggled for so long, and I was still terrified that Bruno would find out I’d had the baby, if he found us… I didn’t know what he would do. Ray and I were living in a trailer, struggling to make ends meet and… I got an offer from my cousin, she offered me a job in Boston… I couldn’t have looked after a child and worked as well. So I just left…’ Rolls of moisture slid out of her eyes, and she made no attempt to brush them away.
‘A child needs a mother too,’ Ivy said. ‘Ray sold him off to the fighting circuit when he was eight… I guess looking after a child that wasn’t his took its toll on Ray too. Mauri didn’t find him until he was thirteen.’
‘Mauri told me,’ Carina said, twisting in her seat to reach over and put a hand on the arm of Ivy’s chair. ‘He told me everything t
hat he knew… Mauri found out that his wife was cheating, I don’t think that he ever knew who her lover was, if he did then I suspect he’d have turned his back on Bruno too. Trystan was only five or six when she died.’
‘How did she die?’
‘Mauri didn’t tell me,’ Carina said. ‘But it wasn’t long after he discovered her affairs… read into that what you will.’
‘You think that Mauri…?’
‘I know that he was a ruthless man in his hey-day, even Bruno feared him, and he had a reprehensible reputation of his own.’
Would Mauri have killed his wife for having an affair? It was a possibility and one that Ivy would have to ask Dax about. There was only a year between him and Trystan, given that, he wouldn’t have been in the Stark mansion when Mauri’s wife died, so he might not know anything about what went on.
‘Wait,’ Ivy said aloud. ‘There’s only a year between Dax and Trystan…’
Carina said nothing to the unspoken question and it would be impossible to know if Bruno had knocked up two women a few months apart. Now she had a secret of her own, Ivy would have to tell Dax, she couldn’t know all of this and not tell him. If it turned out that Trystan was his half-brother then Dax would go into self-destruct mode, he hated the guy.
But now that she thought about it, Trystan was nothing like Mauri and Brad, they were both dark haired and had a similar build and work ethic. Trystan was an anomaly, but maybe that came from being the youngest, he was spoiled. She had no idea what Mauri’s wife looked like, what her colouring was, or her upbringing, but Dax might.
‘I have to call Dax,’ Ivy said, Carina caught hold of her.
‘He’s been through so much…’
‘Yes, he has,’ Ivy said. ‘But he has to know the truth.’ Except with this bounty hanging over their heads now perhaps wasn’t the time to split his focus.
‘I’m glad that he found you, that you two… that he has a woman in his life who loves him for who he is.’
‘I do,’ Ivy said. ‘None of this explains why you came back now.’
Fighting Back (Harrow Book 2) Page 19
