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She stared at him aghast. “You’re joking!”
“I wish I were. He’d found my Achilles’ heel. Desmond is a very wealthy man. The banker involved was an old friend of his who held all Desmond’s bank accounts.”
“You could’ve reported the banker.”
“For what? Bertha and Henry were too old to still be in debt for such a large amount, even though the value of the land more than covered the debt. But it could be argued that it was a sound business decision.”
“It was immoral.”
“Sure.”
He smiled at her, and a chill settled in Candace’s stomach. “There’s more to the story, isn’t there?”
“Bertha and Henry were evicted from the house on the property. The shock caused Henry to have a heart attack. I went to see Desmond full of sound and fury. Desmond told me that I could stop it all.”
“How?”
“By marrying his daughter. But he didn’t intend to make it easy for me—he wanted me to pay for not marrying her earlier. In return for agreeing to marry Jilly, he would sell Bertha and Henry’s garden center to me at a ridiculously inflated price. He resented me. He made it quite clear that things would only get worse for Bertha and Henry if I didn’t accept his deal. They would lose not only the garden center, but also the home where they’d lived for forty years. Desmond also intended to humiliate the old couple by having them declared bankrupt. The center would be sold and developed—” Nick stopped, an agonized expression on his face “—God, he’s so predictable.”
“Oh, Nick…” Candace could see it all. Jilly desperate for the man of her dreams, Desmond wanting to get his way at all costs, and Nick wanting the best for the elderly couple who had given him a chance in life. “How tragic.”
“I had no choice… I couldn’t risk Bertha’s happiness and Henry’s health. It brought Henry and Bertha a future together. It was worth it. Now she has her job in the garden center—which she loves.” He shrugged. “So I married Jilly. Part of the deal, in addition to a brutal repayment schedule, was that I gifted stock in Valentine’s to Jilly in our prenuptial contract—a tangible hold over me for good behavior.” His mouth slanted. “I had right of first refusal on buying those shares back once the full price for the Williamses’ business was paid or Jilly and I had a baby—whichever came first. But she died before I made the final payment.”
“But you had Jennie…”
Was that why Jilly had been so desperate to have a baby? To secure for the husband she’d trapped into a marriage he’d never wanted some degree of freedom? Candace wanted to believe Jilly had regretted the way events had played out.
Nick was shaking his head. “That is no help because, remember, I was sure Jennie wasn’t mine—and now I’ve discovered Jennie is not Jilly’s biological baby. She’s yours.”
“But Jilly adopted her,” Candace argued. “Jennie is very much Jilly’s baby. That stock is yours.”
Nick shrugged. “I have a team of lawyers looking into that right now.”
“What did you do after you accepted the deal?”
“I started to work like a dog so that I could repay Desmond.”
“And you employed Bertha?”
“At first I tried to get her and Henry to stay in the house on the property. She’s a proud old woman, and she wouldn’t accept what she regarded as charity. Now I owned the garden center that had been hers and Henry’s. So I offered Bertha a job and in return she and Henry got to stay in the house while working for me for four mornings a week. The rest of the time she spends with Henry.”
“No wonder Bertha adores you.”
“She doesn’t know the half of it—” he gave her a warning glance “—and I trust she never will.”
“I won’t say a word.”
It wasn’t surprising that he didn’t trust love. It was clear that he’d never loved poor, needy Jilly. In her desperation, Jilly had driven him away before any relationship between them had gotten off the ground.
“Given the state of your relationship, why the decision to start a family?”
“Jilly had always wanted a baby.” Nick looked away. “She’d made that clear from the moment I placed a wedding band on her finger. I wasn’t spending a lot of time home…I think she was lonely.”
At the mention of their wedding Candace felt an unexpected stab of jealousy. Yet their union hadn’t yielded a child. Maybe that was never meant to be. But the flip side of that coin was equally hard to accept: she and Nick couldn’t possibly be meant to be, either.
