Free The Heir From Nowhere by Trish Morey Page B

discussion seemed significant in getting a handle on how this man ticked. ‘So you don’t actually
produce
anything, then. Anything real, I mean. At the end of the day, what do you have to show for your efforts?’
    ‘More money.’
    Alongside him, she sighed, a strange little sigh of satisfaction, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
    ‘Absolutely not.’ She swept an appreciative hand along the designer dashboard, fiddled a bit with the buttons on the console. ‘Clearly you must be awfully good at it.’ He almost growled. He got the distinct impression her words had not been intended as a compliment.
    His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. What was her problem? He’d dragged himself up from nothing. He’d turned himself into a billionaire, had half a dozen cars and a helicopter at his disposal and here she was saying he didn’t make anything?
    ‘I suppose you’d prefer it if I worked at a factory like your philandering husband.’
    He caught the look in her eyes, shock giving way to a look of pain, as if she’d been deeply wounded, before she turned her head away.
    And someone who wasn’t used to apologising for anything or to anyone but who’d done their fair share lately suddenly felt like a heel again.
    He might be ruthless in business, but that didn’t mean he could go around kicking someone when she was down, even if she did provoke him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’
    ‘No. It’s okay,’ she said, now studying the hands knotted in her lap. ‘I guess I asked for it. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Do you miss him?’
    Her head swung around—‘Shayne?’—before setting into a shake. ‘I think I actually miss the car more. The last few months have been …
difficult.
I guess if I’d had my eyes open, I might have seen it coming but the IVF treatment kind of takes your focus.’
    Didn’t he know it? ‘There are always things we should have seen coming and yet somehow we miss them until it’s too late.’
    And he felt her cool blue eyes on him, felt their questions and their wondering. He kept his own eyes firmly fixed on the traffic.
    In his peripheral vision he picked up her shrug. ‘Anyway, I’m glad it’s not Shayne’s baby. I don’t think I could have coped with learning about the affair while thinking I was carrying his child.’
    Did she realise how wrong she was? This was a woman who’d been abandoned because she’d stood up to her husband and refused to abort a baby that wasn’t even hers, a woman who was somehow planning tostruggle through that pregnancy alone to give birth to a baby she didn’t even plan on keeping. This was a woman who could pack an overnight bag in ninety seconds flat when most women he knew couldn’t do it in under ninety minutes.
    Sure, the woman might look like a mouse but she had a spine made of steel. It had taken courage to call him and even more courage to agree to meet him after that angry first phone call. And she’d been afraid—so afraid and so unsure and so quick to cower down as if she wished she could disappear. But, in spite of her fear, in spite of a sickness that left her weak and pale, she had turned up, only to have to defend herself against his accusations.
    He glanced down at his watch before turning on the radio for another market update.
    ‘Believe me,’ he said gruffly, genuinely surprised to find a germ of respect for her in his thoughts, ‘you would have coped.’
    She didn’t get a chance to ask him what he meant. He kept the radio on, absorbing a never ending stream of information. She tried to make sense of it. Minings. Industrials. NASDAQ. All Ords. But there was nothing she could relate to, nothing to anchor it to her life, and eventually she gave up and simply enjoyed the journey and the growing sense of anticipation welling up inside.
    And she was excited, she realised. She’d left her home, the one home she could ever remember living in to go—where, exactly?