Millionaire Dad's SOS (10 page)

‘About?’

She scrunched up her nose. ‘Things far too blah to go into on such a beautiful night. I’m sorry. Where were we? Ruby.’

Back to Ruby. Always Ruby. It occurred to him then that she might be using his daughter as a shield as much as he had been. He couldn’t help but wonder why.

‘Meg.’

‘Zach,’ she said in a mock-sombre voice.

‘Tell me.’

She focused on the flowers around his neck. ‘It’s just all this stuff that I haven’t thought about in years that has shuffled up to the surface in the last little while. And then you sit there all noble, making forgiveness sound so easy when I just don’t think I could—’

‘Tell me,’ he said again.

She blinked at him. All big blue eyes and down-turned mouth. ‘I can’t believe I’m about to…God, where do I begin?’

His voice felt unusually tight as he said, ‘Wherever you see fit.’

‘Okay,’ she said with a hearty sigh. ‘There’s this one memory that’s been playing on my mind. Years ago my father was given an Honorary Doctorate of
Commerce by a university in Melbourne. He’d never gone to uni, never even finished high school, so it was a matter of immense pride. One of my brothers had scraped his knee or something equally boyish, so Mum waited at the hotel to be taken with them in the town car and my father drove himself, with me there, at my mother’s insistence, to keep him company. This was years before GPS.’

She looked to him. Her eyes narrowed, almost pleading he get her to stop. He just nodded.
Go on.

‘Anyway, when he finally admitted he was lost he gave me the street directory and told me to show him how to get there. I’d never used one before, couldn’t pronounce half the street names, so I read the map wrong and we were late. Less than five minutes, but late is late.’

She stopped again. Licked her lips. Her hands were shaking. The tension streaming off her was palpable. He could feel his pulse beating in his temples.

‘What did he do?’ Zach asked, half not wanting to know, half needing her to trust him enough to tell him.

‘Before the engine had even come to a halt he turned on me. With such venom.’ She shook her ponytail off her shoulder to hide the flinch as the memory came at her. ‘I was careless, ridiculous, stupid and I had to find my own way back to the hotel to teach me to take heed of where I was and who I was with. By the time I made it to the hotel
it was after dark, my mother was beside herself and my father had holed himself up in his room. His doctorate thrown onto the front table of the suite as though it was rubbish.’

Her eyes flickered to his—dark, grave, wounded. Eyes so beautiful they should never be made to look that way. His fingers curled into fists and adrenalin like he’d never felt shot through him.

‘How old were you?’

‘About Ruby’s age. Maybe a little younger.’

He’d known it the moment she’d started telling the story. Hearing her admit as much still made him want to hit something. Or more particularly someone.

‘It wasn’t the first time,’ he said matter-of-factly.

She shrugged and seemed to disappear even further inside her ample skirt. ‘Ever since I can remember he’d always been distant. Working a lot. But the first time he took it out on me was the time I told my nanny I was adopted. I thought it was because I’d dare think not being one of them was a more attractive option.’

‘And now?’

She let out a long, shaky breath. ‘Now I wonder if I had it all backwards. There have always been rumours…’ She swallowed, and looked at him, her big, blue eyes begging him to say the things she couldn’t.

Zach said, ‘You mean his affairs?’

‘Not the kind of thing a parent can keep from
their kid when even rumours make the papers.’ Her mouth twisted, but a gleam had lit her eyes, as though her strength was returning now she wasn’t the only one bearing the load. ‘I’ve often wondered if I was an afterthought. A way to keep their marriage together. If so, it worked. But while my mother never gave a hint of it, the only way I could make sense of my father’s behaviour was that I was a reminder of the worst time of his life. That he regretted it. And regretted me.’

‘Even if that’s true it’s not your fault.’

She shrugged. ‘I know. I do. And I don’t even care any more. At least I thought I didn’t. I don’t even know why I brought it up.’

Zach understood all too well. ‘You’ve made it very clear exactly why I need to always put Ruby first.’

‘I did? I guess I did. And don’t you forget it!’

Her soft mouth turned up into the echo of a familiar smile. As they looked into one another’s eyes the night stretched and contracted, and once again they communicated more in the silence than mere words could ever say.

Ruby’s card began to burn a hole in his top pocket. If ever there was a moment for him to take a risk and give it to her…

And then she yawned. ‘And on that note now seems like a good time to escort me back to my room.’

She flapped her hands at him. He pulled himself to his feet before pulling her after him. As they stood face to face her perfumed scent washed over him, delicate and delicious.

All he’d have to do was slide a hand around her neck and pull her to him and that mouth would be all his. The urge to kiss her, to take away the hurt, to give her something warm and wonderful to think about instead was overwhelming.

But she wasn’t some gorgeous young thing putting her hand up for a one-night stand. She’d had an intense night. Her thoughts were so obviously still scrambled. He’d be taking complete advantage.

‘One last question,’ he said, his voice low and rough.

She raised one sexy eyebrow.

‘It’s about Ruby. I know, I know, I’m getting predictable.’

The corner of her mouth twitched as though she knew exactly what he was doing. ‘Shoot.’

‘Should I get her a pet? A rabbit maybe?’

She let go of his hands and backed away from the beach towards the resort, towards the end of the night. ‘You can’t get her a rabbit! They’re a pest in Queensland. Start with a goldfish. Let her choose it. Let her name it whatever she wants. She’ll be putty in your hands.’

He caught up in three long strides. ‘You had a fish?’

‘I was a terrible pet owner. I always forgot to feed them, and they had a habit of leaping from the tank in desperation to leave me. But Mum just kept on replacing them. A dozen fish must have died to save the poor woman from having to tell me what was happening.’

‘What did you name your first fish?’

She bit back a smile. ‘Luke Skywalker. I so-o-o wanted to grow up to be Luke.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I know better. Han Solo is the bomb.’

M
EG
felt more than a little shaky as she walked slowly beside Zach up the white stone path leading away from the lake back to the resort.

What a mess. The things she’d said, the things she’d admitted. So many years she’d kept them deep inside. And then along came Zach and her tightly reined-in emotions were in a tailspin.

There was only one conclusion. She was falling for him. She might as well have been running around with a pair of scissors in her hand. It was only a matter of time before she got seriously hurt.

She had no idea if it was ten at night or three in the morning. The moon told her nothing as she had no sense of direction. The grass was grey and dewy, low cloud cover hovered higher up the path, lending a magical feeling to the place. If she weren’t feeling as highly strung as a thoroughbred she might even be able to enjoy it. Instead all she could think about was the man walking silently at her side.

At the very least she knew he’d taken from her shambolic confession what she’d wanted him to—that the foundations of his whole relationship with Ruby were being forged
right now
. The good moments, the pancakes-for-breakfast moments, should be the ones she remembered too.

But even knowing she’d done a selfless thing didn’t stop her from feeling like a bowl of jelly on a shaky table.

She slowed her steps before she tripped over her numb feet. Zach’s slowed to match.

‘Zach?’ she said, her voice so croaky she cleared her throat. ‘Can I just ask, the things I told you before, I—’

He shook his head and held up a finger an inch from her mouth. Her words dried up in her throat.

Zach’s voice was deep when he finally opened his mouth to speak. ‘My parents passed away when I was five years old. With no other family I grew up in a slew of foster homes and state-run children’s homes—some fair, more atrocious. It didn’t matter which, I was still pushed in and pulled out again months later, again and again, with no warning and no word as to why. I had no consistent contact with any one person—no supervisor, no parent, no other foster child—until the day I turned sixteen and I caught a bus to Sydney and began my life.’

Meg realised she was breathing heavily. ‘God,
you must think me a schmuck. Complaining about my father when yours wasn’t even—’

‘No,’ he said with a stilling hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t do that. No comparing. We each need to own what we’ve been dealt or we’ll never be able to move on.’

She nodded. Then laughed softly to release the pent-up energy coursing through her starting at the point where his strong hand lay upon her bare shoulder. ‘You’re making me think I ought to have listened harder in wellness class.’

She shook her head, angry at herself for being flippant when talking about anything real. If there was ever a time to not go there, this was it.

She looked up at Zach—tall, dark, divine. ‘Have you really owned your past?’

He made a clicking noise with the side of his mouth. ‘Please. Why do you think I keep building bigger and better wellness resorts? I’m looking to prove I’m better than my past as much as the next man. But in the past few days I have come to understand a little more about what my foster parents went through. Not taking me in with open arms had little to do with me at all. They would have had to have been masochists to have given that kind of emotional investment to a child they knew would never be theirs. Knowing there’s even a minute chance is akin to emotional torture…’

His voice petered off.

‘But Ruby—’

‘Might still not end up with me.’

‘What?’ Meg said, her voice like air. ‘How?’

‘We have up to a year for the state to decide if I am a fit guardian,’ Zach said.

Meg’s heart squeezed as she remembered the look in Zach’s eyes when he’d said his life had changed in a heartbeat when Ruby had come along. The look in Ruby’s eyes when she’d proudly said who her father was. ‘How long have you had her so far?’

‘Seven months, eight days.’

Meg bunched her dress to keep her hands busy lest she do something stupid like hug the guy.

She couldn’t even imagine the daily torture it must be to have something so wonderful within reach, knowing it might yet be snatched away. She glanced up at his beautiful profile. Okay, so maybe she could imagine it just the tiniest little bit.

She placed a hand on her heart. ‘If there’s
anything
I can do. Write a letter of recommendation. Talk to the judge. My family has connections the likes of which you wouldn’t believe.’

Before he could be too proud to turn her down, she held out a hand close enough she could feel the warmth of his breath washing against her skin.

‘Forget you’re not a fan of hoopla. If you need to in order to fight for Ruby, use me for all I’m worth. My notoriety has to be good for something more than invites to every party in town, right?’

He wrapped his fingers around her hand, sliding them through hers until they were intertwined. ‘I was going to say thank you.’

‘Oh. Well, then, you’re welcome.’

She glanced at him, the dark silhouette striding alongside her in the near darkness. Things were even more complicated than she’d imagined. A little girl. A custody battle. And all remarkably hush-hush. How he did it alone, with no family support and with such integrity, she had no idea.

‘Is that why you don’t do press? You don’t like talking about your background?’

‘I didn’t like being judged for something I had no control over then and I still don’t.’

‘Why?’

She looked up at him too late to notice how tight his jaw had become.

‘If people tell you you’re crap often enough, you begin to believe it.’

‘You don’t think I know that?’

‘I say don’t give them the chance.’

‘I say find a way to negate it so that it can no longer hurt you. There’s nothing at all shameful about it. Who you’ve become is amazing.’ She looked down at her toes sticking out of her Grecian sandals. ‘I mean, the story of how you got here is amazing. Think about all the foster kids you could help if they knew how you’d pulled yourself up by your own socks to become who you are.’

‘Not going to happen. I have to think of Ruby.’

‘And what about her?’ she asked. ‘Are you ever going to tell her where you came from? And if you do will you swear her to silence? Or keep her locked up here for ever to protect yourself from the sting of other people’s opinions?’

‘What about your father?’ he shot back.

‘What about him?’

He pulled her closer, until they came to a stop. ‘He’s a bully. Hell, Meg, he was emotionally abusive to you. Yet of all the parts of your life on show, why has that never come out? Why not show other young girls that their own expectations of themselves are the ones that matter, not what other people think they should be?’

She tried to expertly extricate her hand from his, a move she’d pulled a thousand times, but it was as though he had been waiting for it.

He took her other hand so she was stuck facing him when he said, ‘Forget Ruby for a moment—what about all the other little girls who read magazines and look up to you as a role model?’

That was what her volunteer work was for! So what if the girls whose hair she braided and the boys she played cops and robbers with didn’t know who the woman behind the bleached-blonde wig and brown contacts was? At least she was there.

She itched to tell him so. To say out loud that working at the Valley Shelter was the most rewarding
thing she’d ever done and that every moment she spent flirting with a camera lens so that her rotten bloody father got the chance to muck about with someone else’s hard-earned savings felt more and more like hard work.

Especially when even having looked death in the eye it hadn’t once occurred to him to make retribution.

But the old fear of being thought ridiculous for thinking herself more valuable than she was rose up her ankles, her calves, her waist, until it reached her throat and she sputtered like an old car whose engine would never again come to life.

‘I do think of them,’ she said. ‘I am doing what I can. In my way. Just not the way you mean.’

He closed his eyes a moment and took a calming breath. He was probably counting to ten. Her brothers did that all the time.

When he opened his eyes they were deliberately calm. As such she wasn’t nearly prepared for his next words.

He said, ‘So you’re not simply filling the void of not being loved by your father with being loved by the entire world?’

She coughed out an incredulous laugh, and dragged her hands from his to slam them onto her hips. ‘Are
you
trying to tell
me
that giving up your life for Ruby isn’t your way of making
someone
in the world love you back?’

Silence stretched between them as taut and dangerous as an overstretched rubber band.

Until Zach said, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s how this all began. But I do love her. And as soon as she comes home from Clarissa’s, I’ll tell her so because it’s important for a little girl to know her dad loves her. Or so someone I trust told me.’

Meg shook her head. This was backfiring big time. If he pulled when she pushed she was never going to be rid of him. Instead, he was being gorgeous and warm and understanding and a tower of strength and a wonderful dad.

With a growl at the moon she headed back up the path again.

‘Meg,’ he said from behind her.

She waved a go-away hand at him.

He jogged to catch up to her, this time spinning her to face him with the gentlest of pressure at her elbow.

‘Thanks ever so much for being such an enchanting escort, but I’m sure I can make it back from here.’ She glanced at her surroundings to discover they had gone a ways past the Waratah House turnoff and had found themselves outside one of the lovely little bungalows on the way to Zach’s place. A light was on over the porch.

‘I could do with a coffee right about now—how about you?’ he asked.

She whirled to stare at him. The moon was now almost completely obscured by cloud and his eyes
were nothing more than patches of black within his shadowed face. ‘Now what are you talking about?’

He waved a hand towards the bungalow. ‘I use it as my office. Some nights I stay over rather than heading back to the house. So the pantry is well stocked with all sorts of delights, including coffee.’

‘Oh,’ she said, his meaning not even the slightest bit obscured by the fact that she couldn’t see his eyes. He’d been leading her here the whole time. To his cosy, empty, private abode. Which had a bed. And coffee.

She licked her lips as her mind whirled a million miles a minute. ‘And you kept this from me the whole time? The coffee part, I mean.’

His mouth lifted so the preposterously sexy arc in his right cheek put in a surprise appearance. ‘I wasn’t prepared to share my coffee with you then.’

‘And now?’

He lifted a hand to slide it into the hair at the base of her neck, the tug of his warm fingers almost too much to bear.

‘I’d say things have changed rather dramatically over the past few days. My eyes have been opened in more ways than one. And I only have you to thank. Coffee seems a meagre place to start.’

Meg swallowed, her mouth dry, her blood thundering in her ears until she felt the slightest bit dizzy. There were reasons, good reasons why this couldn’t happen, only she couldn’t remember one.

He slid his spare hand into his trouser pockets. She imagined she could hear the soft tinkle of keys somewhere on his person.

‘Zach—’ she said, her voice half appeal, half groan.

‘Enough talk,’ he said.

He leaned down and kissed her. And she was on her toes, reaching up to him even before he gathered her into his arms.

The raging heat of his kiss swept her away, spiralling her into the cosmos until she could no longer feel her feet. Could no longer remember her name.

Or why they hadn’t been doing this all along.

Meg lay on Zach’s bed, white cotton sheets tangled about her, his long limbs trapping her in his warm embrace.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only a couple of hours before sunset. Rylie and Tabitha would soon notice her gone. They’d assume where she was, and they’d be right. They’d known she’d end up here before she did. As apparently did Zach. It seemed everyone knew her better than she knew herself.

She tilted her head to watch Zach’s sleeping face. The creases at the edges of his eyes had disappeared. His tanned skin looked radiant against the white pillow. A faint line curved down his right cheek, a reminder of the arc that grooved deep when he
laughed. He was sleeping like a man with no worries on his mind.

She reached up and slid a curl from his forehead. He didn’t stir.

Such gentle strength. She felt it infusing her more with every second she spent in his arms until she couldn’t imagine when in her life she would ever have felt this kind of peace, this slowly budding confidence that if she looked deep inside herself she might not be afraid of what she saw.

The words spilled from her lips to his sleeping form before she even knew they were coming. ‘I volunteer at the Valley Women’s Shelter at least once a week. It’s a halfway house for women who’ve managed to break free of abusive relationships but have nowhere else to go. Most have kids. Most have nothing with which to go it alone bar the clothes on their backs. Many are so battered and bruised they can barely talk.’

He shifted and she held her breath. He slid his leg along hers, wrapping his arm tighter about her, sending warm waves of pleasure all over her body. But his eyes remained closed. She waited until the sensations rolling across her skin dissipated, and his breaths were once again even and deep.

‘I wear a blonde wig,’ she whispered, ‘contacts, the kind of make-up you’d see in a bad eighties movie, clothes I picked up in a bargain bin at a thrift store. I can walk through a throng of paparazzi in
front of my building and they don’t turn an eye. The guys at the shelter know me as Daisy. They’ve never asked questions, just appreciated someone giving their time to play with the kids while the mums have medicals, or to just sit and hold a woman’s hand while they tell their stories to the counsellors.’