“Sweeten the pot?” She felt a building sense of dread. Just what kind of incentive had Charles offered?
“You really don’t know?”
“If I knew, would I be asking?” she snapped.
“Strange, given that you’re his valued employee, and given—by your own admission—how close you are and how much you care about him, that he didn’t see the need to apprise you of his intentions.”
She didn’t like his unspoken insinuation that there was something unsavory between her and Charles. Sure, she loved him—like a father. But how could she explain that to Judd now? He’d never believe her.
Judd leaned back in his chair and fixed her with his intense gaze. “It seems that your esteemed employer wishes to offer me a controlling interest in the family business.”
“He what?”
A controlling interest? Just like that? Black spots swam before Anna’s eyes and she gulped at the air. How could Charles do that to Nicole? How could she have done that to Nicole? Anna knew her best friend had standards just as high as Charles’s when it came to loyalty and honesty. When she found out that Anna had been the messenger who had gone behind Nicole’s back to practically hand deliver Charles’s company to Judd, would Nicole ever forgive her?
“And that’s not all. Apparently, he wants to assign the family home to me, as well.” He casually waved the letter in the air. “All to do with whatever I please.”
Anna couldn’t believe her ears. “He wouldn’t do something like that. You have no loyalty to Charles, no loyalty to Wilson Wines. For all we know, you’d just sell off your share to someone who didn’t give a damn. Charles would never do something so rash.”
Would he? Had he become so desperate to mend the vast chasm between father and son that he was prepared to offer the world on a platter? This would destroy Nicole. She’d grown up in the New Zealand house—it was still her home. And she’d poured her heart and soul into the business—surely not to simply see half of it handed over to her brother? Charles couldn’t be so cruel.
But Anna knew full well that Charles was capable of doing such a thing. Single-minded to a fault, his aim was to return his son to his side before he died. When his doctors had confirmed that time might be running out, he’d gone after his goal to bring Judd back into his life with every weapon at his disposal. He’d do whatever it took, even if it meant hurting the daughter who loved him so very much.
Ever since the posthumous delivery of a letter from his former partner and biggest business rival, Thomas Jackson, he’d become obsessed with Judd, with somehow rebuilding a bond between them. Anna hadn’t been privy to the contents of the letter but she’d wager her very generous salary that it had to do with the rift between the business partners and Cynthia and Judd leaving New Zealand very shortly after. She’d often wondered if Thomas Jackson and Cynthia had been lovers.
Which begged the question—had Charles believed Judd was not his son?
Judd passed the letter across to her.
“Read it for yourself.”
The words blurred before her eyes and she blinked to clear them. It was true. There, in Charles’s scrawling black handwriting, was his desperate appeal to the son he’d turned his back on twenty-five years ago. She knew what it must have cost the older man to put his emotions in words like this. Never a demonstrative man, it shocked her to see him pour his heart out onto the page. Ever hedging his bets, though, he’d insisted on Judd undergoing DNA testing to prove he was, without a shadow of a doubt, Charles’s child. Ah, so there had been some doubt. Now everything began to make sense.
She finished scanning the letter and neatly folded it before handing it back to Judd.
“I had no idea he had planned this. Will you accept his offer?” she asked.
“He insults my mother, even after all this time, and you think I’m going to leap at his offer?”
“Insults Cynthia?” She didn’t follow his reasoning.
“The DNA test. He wants proof she didn’t cheat on him when I was conceived. It’s obvious, no matter what he says in that letter, he hasn’t changed a bit. He still expects to call all the shots. And then there’s you.”
“Me?”
“What’s your role in all this? Did he expect you to also sweeten the deal?”
Anna felt a flush rise in her cheeks. “I don’t think I like what you’re suggesting.”
“Well, you can’t blame me. You come to my family’s home, you fail to identify yourself or your reasons for being here and you show yourself to be very receptive to attention from me. You certainly didn’t object last night when I kissed you.”
“That was …”
Words failed her.
“It was what, Anna? Going over and above the call of duty?”
Anna bit back the retort that sprang so readily to her lips and forced herself to calm down.
“I did what I came to do, you have the letter, you’ve read it. Now the ball is in your court.”
And she’d failed Charles, she admitted to herself. The knowledge lodged like a heavy ball of painful regret knotted tight within her chest. The most important thing he’d ever asked of her and she’d screwed it up.
“Please, I beg of you, don’t let what I’ve done influence your decision in any way. Charles wanted me to be upfront with you. It was my choice to hold back my real reasons for being here.”
“Why?”
“I knew he wanted to extend an olive branch, but I was concerned about how you might feel about him and whether you would take advantage of him. He’s an old man, old before his time because of his illness. He doesn’t deserve any more misery in his life.”
“And that’s your considered opinion?”
“Of course it is. Look, you don’t know him. You probably barely remember him. Whatever happened in the past is past. It can’t be undone. Can’t you put it aside and consider what it would mean to him to make amends with you now?”
Judd stared at her for a moment, his expression not giving any sign of what he might be thinking. The knot of dread tightened even further.
Put the past behind him? Did she have even the faintest idea what she was asking? Of course she didn’t. She hadn’t been torn from the father who had adored him one minute and then refused to look at him the next. She hadn’t been transplanted into another family, another world, and been told to “man up” because his mother expected him to be strong. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d watched cars arrive at The Masters’ and hoped against hope that his father would alight from one of them. That he’d come to say it had all been a mistake.
But what his six-year-old heart had wished for had never happened and, in time, he’d learned not to scan the parents’ faces at school events for the man whose features he’d always been told were an older version of his own. He’d learned to inure himself from the hope that one day his life would return to what it had been before.
And it had made him a stronger man. A man who knew that the only person he could, or should, rely upon was himself.
His first instinct on reading his father’s entreaty was to ball it up and to tell Anna to take it back to Charles-bloody-Wilson and to tell the old man to put it where the sun doesn’t shine. But then rationality overrode the deviation into emotionalism.
Without realizing it, his long-estranged father had actually given Judd the opportunity he’d quietly dreamed of for many a year—payback. Not only for rejecting