A Night, A Consequence, A Vow

It wasn’t ideal, but discretion was necessary. The club’s stability had to be her priority.

An hour later, despite her good intentions, Emily had abandoned her desk. She stood at her office window, her arms wrapped around her middle, her mind a tangle of thoughts as she stared sightlessly through the glass.

A knock at her office door jarred her out of her head. ‘Come in,’ she called over her shoulder, assuming it was Marsha.

It wasn’t. It was her father.

She turned around and he closed the door, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets.

After an awkward silence, he said, ‘The lawyers are fleshing out the terms. Ray will bring you a draft to review as soon as it’s ready.’

‘Fine,’ she said, but it wasn’t.

None of this was fine.

She wasn’t fine.

Maxwell looked away first. He always did. ‘If you don’t need me—’ he spoke to a point somewhere beyond her left shoulder ‘—I’ll head off and come back when the agreement is ready for signing.’

If you don’t need me.

Emily almost let out a bitter laugh.

Of course she didn’t need him. She had needed him as a child, but he’d never been there, so she had taught herself to need no one.

‘What will you do?’ she asked, forcing the words past the sudden, silly lump in her throat.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed, and Emily didn’t think she’d ever seen Maxwell look quite so defeated.

‘You still have the Knightsbridge apartment?’

Or had he gambled that away too? As he had everything else, including his father’s stately mansion where Emily had lived at weekends and holidays when she wasn’t at boarding school.

He nodded and, though she shouldn’t care, she felt relieved that her father wouldn’t be homeless.

He turned to go and all of a sudden Emily felt as if she were six years old and her daddy was abandoning her again. Walking out of the front door of the mansion and leaving her in that big, silent house with only her grandfather, his stern-faced housekeeper and her mother’s ghost for company.

‘Was it really so hard to love me?’

The words blurted from her mouth before the left side of her brain could censor them.

Maxwell paused, half turned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Did you love her?’

She clasped the pearl at her throat and saw the tension grip her father’s body. He had never talked about the woman who’d died giving birth to his only child.

‘Your mother...’ he began, and Emily’s breath caught, her heart lurching against her ribs as she waited for him to go on.

But he simply shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

And then he left, closing the office door behind him.

Gone.

Just like all the times before.