That day in the garage, with the August sun shining gloriously outside with blatant disregard to the fact that Nathan’s entire world had crumbled around him. There had been blooms everywhere, the gardeners keeping it up for his mother even though she had stopped venturing into the garden for months.
The grief that his mother was gone, the chilling fear, the cold fist in his chest that he could drop dead any minute like her, and the little girl who had stood nervously by the garage door, a silent witness to the choking sobs that had racked him.
He hated everything about that day.
“I’m so sorry that your mother died. I can share my mother with you if you want,” she had said in a small voice.
And in return, he had ripped through her.
“He’s getting married, Nathan.” Maria’s anxiety cut through his thoughts. “That woman,” she said again, refusing to even speak Jacqueline Spear’s name, the loathing in her voice crystal clear even through the phone line, “she’ll finally have what she wanted, after all these years. Eleven years of living shamelessly with him under his roof...”
Nathan grimaced as Maria spouted a few choice words for Jacqueline Spear. Bitterness filled his veins at the thought of his father’s mistress, the woman he had taken up with even before Nathan’s mother had passed.
“It’s his damn life, Maria. He has every right to spend it as he pleases.”
“He does, Nathan. But your mama’s house, Nathan...she’s preparing to sell it. Just two days ago, she asked me to clean out your mother’s room, told me to take anything I wanted. Your mama’s belongings, Nathan—all her jewelry’s in there. She’s putting the entire estate on sale—the grounds, the furniture, the mansion, everything.”
Every piece that had been painstakingly put together by his mother with love. And now in the hands of a woman who had been everything his mother hadn’t been.
“If you don’t come back, it will forever be gone.”
Nathan scrunched his eyes closed, and the image of a brick mansion rose in front of him. A strange anger gripped him. He didn’t want that house to go to someone else, he realized.
He had lived the life of a loner for a decade, and the image of the house he had run away from hit him hard in his gut. “She doesn’t have the right to sell it.”
The silence on Maria’s end stretched his nerves taut. “He gave it to her, Nathan. As a gift.”
Nausea rolled around in his mouth. His father had killed his mother, as clearly as if he had choked the life out of her, with his disgusting affair, and after he’d lived in her house with his mistress and now... His knuckles turned white around the phone.
This he wouldn’t, couldn’t, tolerate.
No matter that he didn’t want to live in the house any more than he wanted to put roots down and settle anywhere in the world.
“He’s giving away my mom’s house as a wedding gift?”
“Not to Jackie, Nathan. To her daughter, from her first marriage. I don’t know if you ever saw her. Your father deeded the house to her a few months ago. After he was dreadfully ill that first time.”
Nathan frowned. So Jackie’s daughter was selling his mother’s house. Getting rid of it for the monetary value it would yield, he supposed.
The restlessness that had simmered inside him a few hours ago dissipated, washed away by furious determination.
It was time to go home. He didn’t know how long he would stay or if he could bear to even stay there at all after so many years.
Neither could he let the house, his mother’s house, fall into some stranger’s grubby hands. He just couldn’t.
He bid goodbye to Maria and switched on his laptop.
In a few minutes, he was chatting with his virtual manager, Jacob. He gave orders for a local manager to look after his cabin, for his airline tickets to be booked to San Francisco and last but not the least, for any information the man could dig up on his father’s mistress’s daughter.
“I HEARD THE investors sold the company to some reclusive billionaire.”
“Someone in HR said he’s only bought it for the patented software. That he intends to fire the whole lot of us.”
“I didn’t realize we had value to attract someone of that ilk.”
What ilk? What billionaire?
Riya Mathur rubbed her temples with her fingers, slapping her palms over her ears in a gesture that in no way could silence the useless speculation around her.
What had changed in the week she had been gone for the first time in two years since Drew and she had started the company? What wasn’t he telling her?
Her chat window from their internal IM program pinged, and Riya looked down at her screen.
A message from Drew: Come to my cabin, Riya.
Riya felt a knot in her stomach.
Things had steadily been going from bad to worse between her and Drew for six months now. Since New Year’s Eve to be exact. And she hadn’t known how to make it better except to put her head down and do her job.
Stepping out of the small cubicle she occupied, only separated from the open cabins in the huge hall by one movable shelf, she marched past an anxious, almost hyper group of staff amassed in the break room toward the CEO’s cabin. She had spent the better part of the morning waiting on tenterhooks, walking around the different teams and trying to persuade them to get back to work while Drew’s door remained resolutely closed.
But his continuing silence, even after an email from her, peppered with little tidbits of gossip, was making her head spin. Running her damp palms over her baggy trousers, she came to a halt at the closed door.
She tapped a couple of times cursorily, and every whisper gathered momentum in pitch and volume. Without waiting for an answer, she turned the handle and the pandemonium behind her descended into a deathly silence.
Stepping inside, she closed the door.
Drew’s lean frame was molded by the sunlight streaming through the windows, the San Francisco skyline behind him.
He opened his mouth to speak but stopped abruptly. Her heart in her throat, Riya took a step in his direction. He stiffened a little more and tilted his head.
That same awkwardness that had permeated their every conversation filled the air thickly now.
But this was work. Their company truly had been a product of them both. “The whole office is buzzing with rumors...” She came to a stop a couple of steps from him. “Whatever our personal differences, this is our company, Drew. We’re in it together—”
“It was your company until you took the first seed capital from an investor,” a new voice, every syllable punctured with a sardonic amusement, said behind her.
Riya turned around so fast she didn’t see him for a few seconds. Blinking, she brought her focus back to the huge table and the man sitting at the head of it. The chair faced away from the window. With his long legs sprawled in front of him, only his profile was visible to Riya.
The entire room was bathed in midmorning sunlight and yet the man sat in the one area of the room that the light didn’t touch. Ungluing her feet from the spot next to Drew, Riya walked across the room so that she could see better.
She felt the newcomer’s gaze on her, studying everything about her. Her usually articulate mind slowed down to a sluggish pace. The feeling that he had been