“I could do that.”
“You think she’ll believe it coming from you rather than me?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Eddie shook his head for a third time. “Not a chance.”
“Why not?!”
Eddie shrugged. “She knows we’re friends.”
“Right now, I’m having severe doubts about that myself.”
“More to the point,” Eddie continued. “You’re my boss, I have to do as you say – you could have ordered me to say this on threat of firing me.”
“But I didn’t! Tell her I didn’t!”
“She’s only got my word for that,” Eddie explained. “And you’re my boss, I have to do as you say. It’s catch 22 really. More to the point again, I’m a man.”
“What?” Nick could feel himself getting a headache.
“In these sorts of situation, a woman is never going to believe a man telling her that she’s misjudged another man. Women believe that men stick together in these situations: bros before hos, bitches be crazy – all that crap. And the fact is, they’ve got a point; men do tend to stick together and help each other get the girl back. And they’ll tell lies to do it. As a gender, we’ve dug our own graves on this one – years of lying for sex has made us very untrustworthy. You can see that women have a point.”
By now, Nick was more or less ready to slap Eddie round the head and tell him to say something useful for once. But it wasn’t Eddie’s fault. Nor was it really the fault of those spectacularly unlikely rules of chance that dictated that Zoe should only hear the worst possible part of his conversation with Adam.
The fault was Nick’s.
He had been ignoring and denying the fact all afternoon because what he had said had not been so bad when taken in context, but the fact was that he had thought all that stuff about Zoe in the first place. He had taken one look at her and judged her on the spot, and if he had not had the opportunity to get to know her better then he would have continued to believe that wholly unfounded and erroneous judgment.
How many times had he done that to other women? Tens? Hundreds? He was a handsome man who attracted more than his share of women – how many had he discounted and mocked because of how they looked? Shame flooded his entire being. Well, he was paying for it now, which was fair, but so was Zoe, which was not.
It didn’t stop there either.
He had made the bet.
He had made a bet on another human being without their knowledge or permission. Once again he had treated Zoe like an object, not like a person at all. All the things that he had said about Adam were true but a month ago they would have been true about Nick as well.
What sort of person gambled on another person? One without any respect for his fellow man (or woman). And while Nick was happy to say that the bet had ceased to matter to him once he had begun to get to know Zoe, that was demonstrably untrue. As soon as he had heard that he had ‘lost’ the bet, he was on the next plane to contest it, still eager to get what was coming to him, or at least not lose what he already had. And he had done this knowing that Zoe would rather have gone to the vineyard.
Presented with a straight choice between time spent with the woman he loved and winning a bet, he had gone with bet. And if he hadn’t done that then none of this subsequent horror would have occurred.
On the good side, these events had let him know what was really important and had forced him to face up to an unpleasant side of himself that he now planned to get rid of. On the bad side; it had all happened too late.
He had lost her.
“What are you going to do?” asked Eddie.
“Everything damn thing I can.” Maybe he had lost her, maybe there was no getting her back, but Nick was not giving up. His life to this point had been spent almost entirely in the service of things that simply didn’t matter, now he had something that mattered very much indeed, and he was not giving her up without a fight.
In two days’ time the board of RothCo would meet, after which point he would be effectively bankrupt, he had two days to, for once in his life, use his money to some good purpose.
Starting with a private jet, heading South.
Chapter Thirteen
It is natural after a heartbreak to find yourself back at the home you grew up in, alongside the people you grew up with. When the most important person in your life lets you down then it’s comforting to be alongside the people who never let you down. It’s probably a bit selfish, because those people are also the people who least want to see you hurting so much, but they don’t mind.
Zoe sat cross-legged on her childhood bed with a stuffed raccoon called Lion hugged in her arms. Initially, when she had entered the room, she had resisted the urge to turn to Lion for solace – she had been drawn to him instantly as she always had as a child when things had gone wrong, but now she was a grown-up and grown-ups were not supposed to rely on stuffed animals for comfort, they were supposed to confront stuff or suffer in isolated silence.
Zoe had given both these a try before muttering ‘screw this’, grabbing Lion and hugging him tightly to her. Some turned to drink in time of romantic crisis, others picked up a rebound partner for some casual sex, some buried themselves in work and still more lost themselves in trash TV. Zoe found a toy raccoon to be far and away the best cure for the blues – she was feeling better already.
She hugged Lion tighter.
When she had been a child, learning which animal was which, she had gone through a period of calling every bird a duck and a every four-legged mammal a lion. Cows were lions, dogs were lions, mice were lions. Lions were lions too of course, but that came up far less often where she lived. The stuffed raccoon had been won for her by her Dad at a travelling fair, and him handing it to her was one of Zoe’s earliest memories.
Her first reaction to it had of course been ‘Lion’, and while she had eventually learned the difference between an actual lion and a raccoon (and a cow, a dog, or a mouse), Lion had remained Lion – that was his name. He had always been there for her, and never had she felt the need of him more acutely than she did today.
The sound of a car approaching outside temporarily stirred Zoe from her reverie.
“Who do you suppose that is?” she asked Lion, who apparently had as little idea as Zoe.
It was not so odd for people to drop by the Blanchard place. Everyone liked the Blanchards and everyone knew that Davis was always available to help mend a fence and Olive would lend a sympathetic ear and freshly baked pie to anyone who might need it. And yet, for reasons that she could not fully explain, Zoe was intrigued.
Still clutching Lion tightly to her, she went to the window and looked out in time to see an airport hire car pull up. The door opened and Zoe gasped sharply and ducked back behind a curtain – it was Nick.
What the hell was he doing here?
Had he come to rub her face in the fact that she had fallen for his plot? A sad pathetic part of her insisted that the only reason he could have for being here was because he did care about her and he had come to explain that all this was a terrible misunderstanding and that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for his hateful words.
But as she thought this Zoe knew that, even were he to say such things, she would not believe a word of it. How could she? After all he had done she knew him to be a skilled liar – how could she possibly believe anything he said? It could all be part of some scheme that would wind up with her heartbroken again.
No, let him beg on his bended knee, she would not take him back, she would not fall for it again, she would not put herself in that position. But the original thought still remained, festering unpleasantly in her mind. For all her good resolutions, a part of her wanted him back; she missed him. She missed the feel of him moving over her, within her. She hated herself for this appalling weakness but she would have done anything to get back the happiness she had had in those few weeks.
Was that all that it had been?
This great relationship over which
her heart bled; a few weeks? It had seemed like so much longer. But perhaps it was not the time they had been together that she had lost, it was the time they would have had together, the time she had imagined them having together, the future she had assumed lay before them.
That was what she had lost, that was what she now mourned.
As she watched out the window, Zoe now saw her father approaching a respectfully nervous looking Nick. To Zoe’s considerable surprise, Davis did not seem angry, he was restrained, controlled, and yet firm in denying Nick entry. Nick in turn remained polite, respectful, even deferential towards the older man, but resolute that he was not going anywhere until (Zoe guessed) he had spoken to her. Davis seemed to accept this while remaining equally resolute in his own assertion that Nick was not going to get to speak to Zoe.
This apparent impasse having been reached, Davis seemed to back down a little, while asking Nick to respect his host’s wishes and stay by the car for the time being. Nick in turn seemed to agree and watched as Davis strolled back to the house, still acting far more calmly than Zoe would have expected under the circumstances.