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‘You can spare me your lies, Alessandro, there’s no gallery here to play to.’
‘Lies?Youtalk tomeof lies?’ he accused as he saw his barb hitting home.
‘I did what I had to,’ Amelia replied, unable this time to meet his gaze.
‘With no thought to the consequence of your actions?’
‘Why should I have? What more can you do to me? You’ve already takeneverything.’
Refusing to let her words needle into his conscience, he pressed on.
‘Amelia—I wasn’t speaking of you. The consequences of any kind of sabotage will put hundreds if not thousands of jobs on the line, the ramifications for their families could be devastating. Didn’t you think of them?’
‘No!’ she cried, the first real sense of emotion breaking through the façade that she had held in place for two years. ‘No. I didn’t. I was thinking of my father, who youbroke. I was thinking of the way he lost not only his business, but his house and his friends and his social standing. It destroyed him.’
He hardened himself against the emotion bringing tears to her eyes that she was too proud to shed. Her loyalty, passion, her love for her father might have been alien emotions to him, but even he would have to have been a rock not to be moved by her. He looked away, out to the edge of the pool and beyond to the piece of land that Thomas Seymore had sold them.
Land that was so unstable it would never have supported the foundations needed for any kind of housing or development. Thomas Seymore’s deception had set them back years and thousands of euros and had been a both brutal and harsh lesson. They had nearly broken themselves, working every single hour they could to buy, fix and flip a much cheaper property nearly a hundred miles away from where he now sat with Amelia. He and Gianni had clawed their way, property by property, deal by deal to the point where they had been able to finally mount a hostile takeover of Seymore’s own business.
‘I remember it, you know. The day you came to our house.’
Alessandro turned his gaze back to Amelia. But there was no indignation in her tone this time, it wasn’t strong with conviction. It was the voice of a daughter who had heard things said about her father that she shouldn’t have.
‘I remember what you said to him.’
The single thread of shame woven into that whole encounter began to unravel deep within him. Alessandro hadn’t taken pleasure from that day—in fact it had been precisely that point that had brought him back from the edge of a cliff he’d been far too close to. In that moment, he’d never been more like his own father and Alessandro had sworn never to be that man again.
‘Don’t,’ he said, before she could repeat the words he and his cousin had said that day.
The look she gave him shamed him anew.
‘You might not have made him drink, but you put the bottle in his hand. You might not have put him in the ground, but you dug that hole, Alessandro. You and Gianni.’
Angry at the truth of her words, at the events that he had unknowingly started, Alessandro lashed out.
‘Amelia, you might be a lot of things, but you’re not stupid. Didn’t you ever wonder why it was so easy for two twenty-year-olds to take over your father’s business? Did you ever think that we shouldn’t have been able to do it?’
‘Why should I?’ she demanded with the blind loyalty of a child. ‘He was my father!’
Perhaps it was the differences in their upbringing. Perhaps he might have been the same had he had a father with even an ounce of love in him. But he hadn’t, so he couldn’t conceive of her naivety. He shook his head, intensely disliking that he was going to have to destroy Thomas Seymore all over again.
‘You might not have the proof ofourcorruption,’ he said to her, pushing back to stand. ‘But you should know that I kept everything about our dealings with your father.’
He walked over to the corner of the living room and retrieved an old faded brown folder from a side cabinet. He returned and placed it in front of her on the table.
She looked up at him, her eyes betraying the first glimpse of doubt he’d seen in her. His conscience told him not to do this. But it was already done.
‘Proof of corruption indeed,’ he said, looking out to the wildflower meadow. ‘How fitting.’
And he left, knowing that she would read the contents of that folder. She wouldn’t be able not to. As the sun began to fall, he paced around the large swimming pool, his gaze returning far too often to the female form bent over the table, turning page after page. With her experience at his company, he knew she would easily interpret the sale documents, evaluations, the different surveys. He’d even left the paperwork for the loan in there—he didn’t care if she read that. He had no shame about how desperate they had been to agree to the punishing repayment rate, nor how hard they’d worked to pay it back, seeing it only as proof of how far they had come. Their plans, their hopes and dreams...everythingwas in that folder.
He heard the scrape of her chair against the floor and turned. She pinned him with such a look his heart lurched. Or at least he thought it had. Then, as the papers in Amelia’s hands scattered, he realised it was her—and he was running before she hit the floor.
CHAPTER FIVE
HERHEARTHURT. That was the first thing she noticed. Not the dull pain in her head that kept her eyes closed, or the hot agony in her shoulder that forced her onto her side. It was the ache radiating out from her heart and soul, confusing her momentarily until she remembered.
She turned to bury her face in a pillow so plush and silky soft she wanted to climb into it. A breath left her lips in a shudder and she curled in on herself like a child. But that only made her think of her father. The father she had looked up to, even as he sank deeper and deeper and further and further into a bottle. Even as he ignored his daughters’ pleas and his wife’s desperation—a wife who would then choose to follow him into a drug-induced oblivion after his death.
