Masquerade: Her Billionaire - Venice

  But that was crazy thinking. She’d left him and he’d done all of it on his own, without her. Hating her every step of the way, it seemed.

  It was unbearable to have him hating her, not knowing the truth. What had seemed so compelling at the time, her iron-clad duty, her desire to safeguard his future, now seemed like pale morning mist, easily dissipated. Her heart had broken that day and he hadn’t known it.

  Suddenly, it was imperative that he know the truth. She couldn’t keep silent one minute longer. When her father had died and the sale had been complete and the two thousand jobs secured, she’d actually trekked out to Stanford to tell him. To throw herself on his mercy, beg forgiveness. Do whatever it took to get back together again. Pay for what she’d done for the rest of her life, if necessary. Gladly. Just as long as they could be together.

  Being without him had been torture. She’d survived simply because she’d been working so hard to take care of her father and the company. But not a minute went by when she didn’t miss him.

  And when she’d finally been free to go out to Palo Alto, she’d seen him, arm around a beautiful woman.

  Laughing. And with a ring on his finger and a ring on hers.

  Back home, she’d applied to a new NGO, Peace and Jobs. The post demanded long hours which sounded fantastic. She wanted to drown herself in work. And the job involved a lot of travel, which was fine. She’d welcomed that.

  And she only just now realized that all that travel had been to keep her far away from Cal Burns. The irony was he’d been working on the same project all this time.

  There were things that had to be said. She had to explain to him what she’d done and why. So she surprised herself when she said, “Are you with your wife here?”

  Only long training kept her from clapping her hand over her mouth.

  The scowl deepened. “What?” He’d been staring stonily at the opposite wall but he suddenly turned his face to hers, his eyes burning. “My what?”

  “Wife.” Anya wanted to be self-confident and matter-of-fact but the word came out strangled. “Your wife,” she clarified.

  “I don’t have a wife.” He said the words clearly and coldly.

  “But — but I thought —” Anya cleared her throat. She couldn’t possibly say, Yes, you do, I saw her.

  If anything Cal’s voice turned even colder. “I was briefly married nine years ago. The marriage didn’t last. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Anya waited. Waited for him to ask the obvious question. And you? Are you married?

  But he wasn’t asking. He was doing an excellent imitation of a wooden statue. An enormously handsome wooden statue.

  There was a long and awkward silence. Cal downed another flute of champagne, put the flute carefully on a small, elaborately-inlaid 18th-century side table and clapped his knees. “Well.”

  His entire body language screamed get me out of here. He stood up and Anya panicked. No, no, no. He couldn’t go now! Not yet. There was too much she had to know. Too much he had to know. She reached out and grasped his hand. “No, please don’t go.”

  He looked down at his hand, with her hand clasping it, then back up to her face. Under her palm, Anya could feel the very fine tremor, barely there. More a vibration than anything else. He wasn’t quite as unaffected as he was pretending to be.

  His look was cold, steely. With a huge pang, Anya remembered a time when she was welcome to touch Cal anywhere, in any way, at any time. Those days were gone.

  Maybe.

  “I know you want to get away, but I need you to listen to me.”

  “You need me to listen to you?” His mouth tightened.

  “Yes. Please hear me out. You owe me that.”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  “I owe you that?” The air seemed to shimmer with his anger. “I don’t owe you anything, Anya. Nothing at all.”

  It was the first time he’d said her name. It was said in rage, but still …

  She tugged at his arm. It was like tugging at a tree trunk. He could have been rooted to the earth for all the good it did her to tug. But … this was her one chance. She’d waited ten years to say what needed to be said and she might not have another chance in this lifetime.

  Certainly his body language didn’t lead her to believe she could one day in the future call him up and invite him out for a coffee and talk. If he hadn’t gotten over his anger in ten years, another ten years wouldn’t do it.

  Anya had seen up close and personal how long grudges could last. Generations. Centuries. She’d been in meeting rooms where talks almost came to blows over something that someone’s great-great-uncle had done to someone else’s great-great-uncle. Love was perishable. Rage? That could go on forever.

  The idea of ending her days with Cal still hating her was unbearable. The weight of the idea sat on her chest like a boulder and made it hard to breathe.

  Unending sadness for the rest of her days. No, absolutely not. This had to be cleared up, now.

  “Sit down,” she said, the words a command. Cal looked at her, startled. He’d known the happy young girl who’d never had any real problems to deal with. Who never raised her voice, because she never had to. Who never pushed, because she never had to.

  Anya had done a lot of growing up in the meantime and she’d spent the past nine years at Peace and Jobs dealing with hard-headed men who had hated each other forever. She had learned the hard way how to project power into her voice and she didn’t need to raise it for it to work.

  Cal sat.

  Okay. Step one.

  She didn’t let go of his arm. He looked briefly down at her hand on his arm and she knew that he wanted to shake it off. She dug her fingers in.

  Step two.

  He wasn’t going to shake her hand off him. He’d have to forcibly remove it and though this Cal was far from the boy she’d known, she didn’t think it was in him to use force on a woman. Inside, he couldn’t have changed that much.

  He hadn’t. He sat and faced her.

  Step three.

  He was staying put and was prepared to listen. She couldn’t know how open minded he was but making people stay put and listen had been how she’d overcome a lot of obstacles in getting people who hated each other to agree on things.

  Anya certainly didn’t hate Cal but she wasn’t too sure the opposite wasn’t true. But she’d overcome impossible odds before.

  She held his arm tightly. Unfortunately, she’d had to grab his left arm. The wrist was covered with a watch. A very nice one. A Patek Philippe, the kind that became an heirloom. If she’d been on his other side, she’d have grabbed his forearm and put her thumb on his wrist to gauge his physical reaction. Though right now his physical reaction was right beneath her palm. His muscles were rigid, unyielding. There was no give at all. He was rejecting her with everything in him.

  Tough.

  There was a structure to negotiations, going from low to high. Start asking for small things and work your way up. Two people who agreed that the sky was blue and water was wet could perhaps be brought to agree that peace was better than war.

  But these weren’t negotiations and Anya had to start from the top.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Do you remember that day in your room? When you told me about the scholarship to Stanford?”

  “What?” He narrowed his eyes until there was only a golden glimmer between the lids. “What kind of trick question is that? Do I remember the day you left me? Fuck yes, I remember it.”

  She winced but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You told me —”

  “I told you I got that fellowship in Stanford and that I’d be moving to California. And I wanted you to move with me. I thought that was our plan. But it’s one thing to fuck the guy who lives in your home town and who is convenient. It’s quite another to follow that guy across the country and lose your cushy lifestyle.”

  Anya schooled her face to express nothing. She’d had long practi
ce at it.

  “That wasn’t the way it was.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Cal’s voice was low and hard. He too had probably schooled himself not to show emotions but he couldn’t control the red slash of anger staining his cheekbones. “It seemed to me it was. When I told you I got the scholarship you bounced out of my bed so fast it made my head spin. You left while my semen was still drying on your thighs. You couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

  “No,” she said steadily. “I didn’t rush out, you are not remembering correctly. But it is true that I turned down your offer to follow you to California.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Anya!” His voice rose and he leaned forward. “We’d talked about it, lots of times. You said you couldn’t wait to leave Massachusetts and move to California! There was a period you put only Beach Boys on your phone. But then I guess you realized what life might be like with me, and without your father paying rent on your fancy apartment and without him slipping you a couple thou a month for incidentals. You’d have to live at my level and you just couldn’t do it.”

  Part of that was true. She had been looking forward to the move. She’d wanted that move more badly than Cal. She couldn’t wait. She loved her father but he’d become more and more heavy-handed, more controlling. It wasn’t healthy. Moving across the country with the man she loved made more and more sense every day. She hadn’t changed her mind. Her father had changed it for her.

  “What my father gave me went straight into my savings account. And he insisted on the apartment because it had good security. You knew me. You knew me!” She stopped, throat vibrating with emotion. “You knew I didn’t pull back because of the money.”

  “I thought I knew you.” Cal was trying to stay cool but his breathing speeded up. “But I didn’t. I didn’t know you at all. Otherwise you couldn’t have done what you did.”

  Anya opened her mouth, then closed it. What she was about to say she had never said to any human being on earth. Her father had gone to his grave and she’d never talked.

  But it didn’t make any difference now.

  She kept her voice low. A trick a psychologist taught her. When emotional, pitch your voice low. Tension makes the vocal cords tighten and the voice rise. If you keep your voice low you can trick your vocal cords into not betraying tension or anxiety or fear. It was a trick that had served her well over the years, in the middle of shouting matches.

  “That day —” he jerked his arm but she held onto it. He didn’t want to hear about that day. Well, tough shit.

  “A month before that day,” she continued, “I spent the morning with my father. He called me to his office and said we had to talk. He didn’t often do that. I was getting good grades, I was working hard, I didn’t know what he wanted to say.”

  Actually, she’d thought he’d called her in for the eleven billionth time to ask her to ditch Cal, whom he hated.

  “Called you in to ask you to get rid of me, I bet,” Cal said sourly.

  “It actually wasn’t about you. It was about him. He was dying.” She felt his muscles jerk. “You didn’t know he was dead?”

  “Sure, I knew.” Cal’s mouth twisted. “It was in all the papers the next year. Got a lot of press. Sudden heart attack of major industrialist. Pillar of the community. Gave tons of money to charity. Great tragedy for the community. The usual.”

  “It wasn’t a heart attack and it wasn’t sudden.” Anya finally let go of his arm. For the moment, Cal wasn’t going anywhere. He was intrigued enough to hear her out. That was all she needed. If he forgave her, that would be even better, but she wasn’t holding out hope. No one knew better than her how the truth rarely set you free. “He had pancreatic cancer and the doctor had given him two months to live. He actually lived for another six months. We needed every day of those six months.”

  “How so?” Cal asked the question reluctantly, as if the words were forced out of his mouth.

  “You know I didn’t have anything to do with Daddy’s business. I was interested in international relations and languages. I thought everything was fine but when I went to him that morning, Daddy told me that the business was on the brink of bankruptcy.”

  She saw his eyes widen slightly.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “I had no idea. He told me that morning. That the company was going under but that he might have found a buyer. Daddy wanted above all for the buyer to guarantee no job losses. It was part of the contract. That no one be fired for five years. He figured it was the best he could get. But that if the buyer thought Daddy was sick or incapacitated he’d be ruthless and simply buy cheap and lay off as many workers as he could. That’s what some venture capital firms do. Buy up distressed businesses cheap, sell off the parts, fire all the workers. Some of daddy’s employees had been with him for thirty years. He was sick at the thought of having to sell and then have massive layoffs.”

  Anya stopped, remembering that horrible day. Her father hadn’t been an easy character and work had eaten up his life. They weren’t close but she’d loved him. Just how much she loved him had hit her heart like a blow when he told her he had very little time left. Knowing how much he’d sacrificed to build the company, she also knew how much it hurt him to have to sell it, his life’s work.

  Cal was listening to her intently. “You mean you were with me knowing that your father was dying and that the family business was being sold?” His mouth tightened. “You knew that for a whole month?”

  “Yes.” The most horrible period of her life. She’d learned that she was going to lose her father and then she lost Cal.

  His lips tightened, eyes faraway as he remembered that day. “You gave no sign. Nothing.” There was dark accusation in his deep voice.

  She sighed. “Dad made me swear to tell no one. He said the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people depended on keeping the situation secret. The people working for him and their families. I took an oath, Cal. I swore to him that I wouldn’t tell anyone. That I wouldn’t give any sign that anything was wrong. It broke my heart that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tell you anything. But … I thought I was going to have time. That the deal would be signed soon and then I’d be able to talk. A month or two at the most and then I could tell you. But then —”

  “Then I was awarded the fellowship.”

  “And I couldn’t go with you.” The words were pushed out of her tight throat. She could still remember the horror of realizing what she had to do. She had to leave Cal so he could go on to his destiny. Because she’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if she told Cal the truth, he’d have stayed by her side. And he would miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  She’d rather claw her own eyes out than have him sacrifice his life, his future, for her.

  He spoke slowly. “Not if you had to stay by your father’s side, no.”

  And once she’d understood what she had to do, she had to do it fast and brutally. He’d desperately tried to contact her and she’d avoided him. He didn’t know that she’d cried for days in her apartment.

  “No,” she said softly.

  Cal bowed his head, frowning. She knew that look, intimately. It was what she’d secretly called his dog-chewing-on-a-bone look, when he had a difficult problem to solve. He shook his head, once, as if trying to clear it.

  When he lifted his head, the scowl was less fierce. “So —”

  Two simultaneous opening bars from the original Star Trek show sounded.

  “My phone,” she said.

  “My phone,” he said.

  Anya looked at him, startled, and opened her purse.

  She’d been told that the principals of the Accords would be notified by text when the ‘family photo’ — the photo of historical record — was about to be taken.

  She pulled out her phone — and froze, the text forgotten.

  Cal froze too. They stared at each other’s phones.

  Their phones were both iphones, the exact same model — and their phone protectors both had the exact sa
me image on the back.

  Roj.

  Peace, in Klingon.

  They were both Star Trek nerds. Over that last summer, they’d taught themselves Klingon, in a little friendly rivalry. Anya had learned it better because she was a linguist, but Cal had studied hard and become semi-fluent. His first foreign language.

  They’d had so much fun. She hadn’t had fun like that since … since Cal.

  This time when tears sprang to her eyes, she couldn’t blink them back. Separated by ten years, they’d bought the same phone and the same phone protector. That protector wasn’t commercially available, Anya had had had it made to order. So had Cal, apparently. Her trembling hand covered her mouth and she didn’t wipe the tears falling down her cheeks.

  Time telescoped, collapsed, and it was as if she were back in the room with the boy she’d loved, and who’d loved her.

  “Oh Cal,” she whispered, throat aching. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  He didn’t answer. He simply held out his arms and she fell into them.

  He was holding Anya in his arms again. Anya. It felt surreal. It felt perfect. She’d fallen into him and he just gathered her up and held her close while she wept violently. Her slender body shook with the sobs. He held her more and more tightly until he worried that he might be hurting her, but she held him just as tightly. As if she could burrow right through his suit and his skin until she was inside him.

  Fuck yeah.

  He placed his hands on her narrow back, feeling the convulsing muscles, the air rushing in and out of her lungs in huge gulps. Her own arms were around his chest, hands not meeting in the back. Years of working hands-on in desert desalination plants had whittled him down but had broadened his chest. She was leaning against him so hard, cheek pressed over his heart. He rested his chin on the top of her head — her hat actually — and just held her. Knowing she’d be both feeling and hearing the beat of his heart.

  The heart that only beat for her. Had only ever beaten for her.