“I was drunk!” exclaimed Adam. He pointed an accusing finger at his brother. “Really drunk. Frankly, if anyone was taking advantage of anyone that night, it was you of me. Making a bet on which the future of our company hung with someone as drunk as I was? That’s exactly why you’re not cut out for this life. You should see all this as a Godsend. You don’t have to be CEO any more. You never wanted to be! You never have been, and now it’s official. You should be thanking me. This is your chance to go out and do something with your life rather than relying on me to make your money for you and then pissing it away on that ridiculous bar.”
Nick mentally re-grouped. He had to admit, there was some truth in what Adam said. Neither of the brothers had worked to reach their positions in life but Adam had worked to stay there, and he had done a good job. Nick, meanwhile, had used his money and position as a crutch to prop up his failing business and as a safety net that allowed him to fail, or indeed allowed him to do absolutely nothing if he felt so inclined. Perhaps being forced into this position would do him good.
Still, his righteous anger burned.
“How did you make the deal?” It was more out of curiosity than anything else.
Adam shrugged. “I mentioned to Jacques Jourdan that Vanessa was laid up in hospital and that she was devastated that she wouldn’t get to meet him. I didn’t even mention the deal. He was on the first plane out to Johannesburg. I do wonder if he thought he had a better chance with her if she had a broken leg and couldn’t run away – dirty old bastard. Anyway, they got on as well as predicted - like a house on fire. I ‘happened’ to drop by to visit Vanessa on the same day as Jourdan: ‘fancying seeing you Mr. Jourdan. Well as long as you’re here…’ The paperwork was signed that same day. Nice and clean.”
Nick nodded as he took all this in. “You’re very good at your job, Adam.”
Adam acknowledged the compliment. “Thank you. You suck at yours. Now, the question remains: are you going to honor the bet?”
Nick leveled his gaze at his brother. “I’ll honor it, but I still want something from you.”
“What?”
“An apology.”
Adam scoffed. “You’ll be lucky. I’ve done nothing to apologize for.”
“Not to me,” said Nick. “To Zoe.”
“That ghetto piece of trash?”
Nick’s anger flared. “What did you call her?!”
“Oh come on,” Adam backed away from his brother’s rage. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think the same when you saw her in the bar? That hair.” He gestured wildly to his head and rolled his eyes. “Good thing you fixed it. And god, the way she handled herself on the water? Ridiculous that you ever even thought you might win this bet.”
Nick smiled at the memory. Then felt slightly ashamed at his part in making Zoe change herself. He missed her natural hair.
Then stiffened. “How do you know about that?” Another thought crowded in on the first. “Why did you let the bet run? You said you wouldn’t have made the bet sober, so you must have known early on that you weren’t going to let Zoe have a fair chance. So why did you let me keep teaching her?”
A flicker passed across Adam’s face but he did not back down. “I was going to call the whole thing off but… It was just so funny!”
Nick stared in shock.
“For the first day I thought: what the hell, what harm can it do? At the very least it kept you out of the way while I handled the deal. But after a few days I was resolute that we were calling off the bet. You weren’t at the bar and I heard you were giving a horse-riding lesson so I went to find you.”
Adam grinned hugely at the memory. “I haven’t laughed so much in years. Seeing that ghetto booty try to haul her fat ass onto a saddle! I just wished I’d had a camera. And then I thought: there’s going to be so many more moments like this. Hell, I could probably start a YouTube channel: Trash Trying to Classy, or something like that. I didn’t want to miss that! So I hired a private detective to follow discretely and film your lessons. When I showed them to Vanessa - the sight of Zoe trying to be her? I really think all that laughing helped her recover faster. You can put a pig in a ball gown, but it’s still a pig. I couldn’t believe it when you started sleeping with her. Not that I blame you. We all need to slum it sometimes, right? A bit of rough every now and then – very nice. I bet she goes like steam train.”
That he had let Adam get this far, and say this much about Zoe without doing anything about it, said less about Nick’s self-control than it did about how shocked he was. His brother’s undermining the bet and making the deal on the sly was pretty typical, but this?
Nick was stunned to silence. But when he had finally managed to rouse himself from that, he acted quickly. In a few bounding steps he was up and across the room and punched his brother in the face.
Adam fell back against the wall, surprised as much as hurt. “What the hell’s got into you? I’m not criticizing. Have your fun, I say.”
“I can’t believe you would do this!”
“Do what?” Adam was genuinely confused. “She’s just some nobody.”
“She’s a human being!”
“But she doesn’t matter,” Adam observed. “She’s not anyone who actually counts in this world.”
Nick’s fist made contact with Adam’s jaw before Adam had a moment to react.
Adam ducked as Nick continued swinging at him. “I don’t know what your problem is! The way I see it, you should be grateful; not only have I given you the chance to stand on your own two feet for the first time in your life, but thanks to me you got a few weeks of no-strings sex. Seems like we all got something out of this bet.”
“Okay,” Nick managed to get some control over his temper – punching his brother had certainly helped. “You’re right. She was just part of the bet and, yeah, I was angry as hell when you pointed her out in the bar. One look at her and I thought: how the hell can I teach that to be sophisticated? She was just part of the bet, and the most irritating part of it. She was slow, dumb, completely ignorant of anything that could even vaguely be called class, and…”
“Trash,” said Adam, smugly returning to his favored description.
“Yeah,” Nick admitted. “I guess that is exactly what I thought. Nothing to look at, not worth talking to unless you want to talk about barbeque, not even a proper person, just a lump of clay I could maybe mold into something more worthwhile. If it wasn’t for the bet I wouldn’t have gone near her.”
“So you’re getting angry at me because…?” wondered Adam.
“Because I was full of shit,” said Nick. “I probably shouldn’t have punched you, Adam, at least not until I punched myself, because I was as much of an ass when this thing started as you are now. But I have the advantage of you – I got to know her. I got to spend time with this incredible, vibrant, intelligent…”
“Intelligent?!” Adam interrupted, disbelieving.
“Yes; intelligent!” Nick snapped back. “You don’t measure intelligence by whether someone has gone to Harvard or heard of the Huguenots, or if they can whistle along with Verdi – to be honest that’s pretty useless. Zoe’s got a business head that could put you to shame, so you can imagine how she makes me look. More importantly, she’s got emotional intelligence…”
Adam shook his head. “That’s just a phrase dumb people made up to excuse their stupidity.”
“We’ve got it the wrong way round,” Nick went on. “All the stuff we know about; it doesn’t mean anything. It has no practical application. And all this is beside the point – what matters is that she’s a good person. She’s got more human decency in her little finger than you or I have got in our entire bodies. You may know the difference between a Botticelli and a Ghirlandaio, but she knows how to treat people, and that’s knowledge that’s worth something.”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”
Nick, quite unexpectedly, found himself smiling. “You know, you were right: I shouldn’t have got angry. What the hell ha
ve I got to be angry about? I’m the lucky one, because I can see how wonderful she is. I’m lucky enough to be in love with an incredible woman who loves me back.”
“In love?!” Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Yes,” Nick smiled back, a strange serenity descending over him. “And the more I think about it, the less I understand why I even came here today, or why I’m getting upset now. You cheated in our bet, you’ve screwed me out of the family company and cost me millions of dollars. So what? I’ve got Zoe. And nothing you can say or do will change that. You called her trash, and made some other comments about her that really tell me what a disgusting person you are, but in the end, why would I care? I love her. And, amazingly enough, she seems to love me. What you think doesn’t matter. What you say doesn’t matter. I wish I’d realized all this earlier, I could’ve been in France at a vineyard with the most beautiful girl in the world, drinking wine, and making love, while you toil away in an office to grab a few more dollars, as if they’ll make you happy. They won’t, trust me. How much money will ever be enough? Don’t you think we have enough?”
The frustration was starting to show in Adam’s face. Winning was nice, and he had won, but part of the fun of winning was beating the other person and them knowing they had been beaten by a superior competitor. Nick was taking all the joy out of this for him by acting as if he had won!
Adam tried again. “How’s that bar of yours going to do without the family money to prop it up?”
Nick shrugged. “Badly I guess. Zoe had some great ideas, but I doubt I’ve got the money now to put them into practice.”
“And you think that scabby little gold-digger is going to be interested in you now you’re next to broke?” Adam thrust again, seeking for some weak spot in Nick’s oddly impenetrable armor of love.