Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

“She was so beautiful she never had to learn to do anything for herself. I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be like Malcolm. I wanted to be powerful and independent. I wanted to run my own life, not need someone to run it for me.”

“Looks like you got that.”

She nodded. She had the career she’d dreamed about and trained for, the future she’d worked for, almost ripe enough to pluck.

“Why do you hate him?”

She opened her eyes and fell into his. His hands were on her feet, but his gaze was all over her face. She rested her head back on a tower of cushions. He started on her toes. It hurt. She had tension in her toes, how the heck was that possible? “I don’t hate him.”

His hands stilled. She lifted her head, wondering if he’d gotten bored and gone back to watching TV. He was watching her. He’d remembered. “He’s not a good person.” Mace’s hands started moving again.

Malcolm was a genius, a ruthless, arrogant, controlling mastermind. He’d taken a small, privatised credit union and built a global financial services organisation with offices on four continents in fifteen years. But he was also a corporate psychopath, utterly lacking in empathy, brutally uncaring about anything except the business, and capable of destroying anything and anyone standing in the way of his plans. And that extended to family. He’d sidelined his eldest son, Bryan, without a hint of regret when he’d judged him too soft to be of value to Wentworth Finance.

She didn’t want Mace to stop. “He was a terrible stepfather.”

He’d been absent and cold. And from what she’d watched Bryan and Thomas go through, not much better as a father. Bryan was ousted from Wentworth four years ago with nothing but a handshake, and a letter telling him he’d voided his claim to a redundancy payout by being incompetent. Father and son hadn’t spoken since. Malcolm had a granddaughter he’d never bothered meeting. She shivered. That wasn’t going to happen to her. Bryan got distracted by marriage and his passion for flying light aircraft. Jacinta had her eye firmly on the prize and not one of the other leadership team members had the ear of the board or was close to being anointed in Malcolm’s stead.

Mace squeezed her foot. “But you work for him?”

“Shocking human being. Great businessman.”

“You admire him?”

“I...why am I telling you all this? You work for him too.” Though were it not for Mace being seconded to the takeover project and everything going bad yesterday, he’d never be in the same airspace as Malcolm, let alone close enough to hear him shouting.

He dragged his knuckle down her instep and she closed her eyes. She was telling him because she liked what he was doing and it was oddly comforting to have someone to talk to other than Jay, and because Jay knew Malcolm she didn’t talk to him about this stuff.

“No. I don’t admire him. Objectively I respect what he’s done, what he’s achieved, but he’s a deplorable person and there is nothing to admire in his lack of basic human decency.”

Mace’s hands moved to her calf.

Those clever fingers knew what they were doing. “What do I get if I keep talking?”

His thumbs rolled in small circles across the muscle. It was answer enough. “It’s complicated. I do hate him, but I have to respect what he gets done. When I take over I’ll do it differently, but I’m not naive enough to think it’ll be easy. There’ll be sacrifices. There won’t be much of a personal life. But I’m okay with that. It’s a small price to pay.”

“You think that’s small?”

“You think that’s ridiculous.”

He shook his head.

She sat upright and almost pulled her leg away from his hands. He couldn’t possibly understand what drove her, or the thrill the business gave her. “Tell me—you think it’s insane, don’t you?”

“Why do you care what I think?”

She settled back with a laugh, but she did care. She cared what the odd geek from IT thought about her, which was worse, so much worse, than wanting him to drag her into the bedroom and go caveman on her body. The latter was simply physical.

“So, yesterday?” he said.

He wanted to know how much she had riding on the shareholder meeting. He’d heard the shouting, it was a fair question. If Wentworth shareholders had approved the takeover, the company would’ve leapt from fifth biggest in the league banking table to third. So yes, she’d had a lot riding on that meeting, since she’d convinced the board to launch a takeover of their nearest rival in the first place. No meeting, no vote, no approval, no offer. The target company accepted an alternate bid. There were no prizes for coming second.

“I’ll have a couple of weeks of being in the doghouse with Malcolm and the board, but there’s always Plan B.”

She got fingers dancing closer to her knee, and the eyebrow.

“Oh, you didn’t think I had a Plan B?”

He moved so suddenly she started. He planted a hand on the sofa near her hip and a knee level with her thigh. His other hand went to the curve of her ear. He squeezed.