Page 6 of The Second Ending
Couldn’t she have seen through their devious plans? Understood what they were trying to do? She simply hadn’t loved him enough to fight back. He hated her for it.
And now she had the nerve to waltz back into his life with that ridiculous attempt to stop construction of the condo development, the project that would take his company from where he had brought it and send it to the stratosphere. This would be the real making of him, and damn Ashleigh and her fucking parents, he wasn’t going to let some school kids take it away from him.
He wiped at the corner of his eye. It was damp. Must be allergies.
Had she known what he’d made of himself? Did she know it was his company she was confronting? By the shock on her face, he thought, perhaps, that she hadn’t.
Old anger was cold. He thought she’d loved him, but he’d been wrong. After their fight, after those first few pathetic attempts to call him, she’d given up. Just more proof that she didn’t love him as much as he’d loved her. She must not know that he’d got his degree and then had completed an MBA. That he’d used his knowledge and the contacts he made to build his uncle’s small business into a serious concern.
That he could now buy and sell her useless father a hundred times over.
So why did seeing her again now, so unexpectedly, bring all the pain back as freshly as if it had happened yesterday?
The followingday was no better.
Marcus hardly slept all night. He’d gone for a run and had fallen into bed exhausted, but every time he closed his eyes, all he saw was Ashleigh.
Ash then, young and fresh, with that gorgeous face that had stopped him in his tracks the first time he saw her. He was back in the common room, watching her as she studied alone, or chatted with friends, and could hardly believe his luck when she spilled her coffee on his notes.
Oh, he’d been upset, but he knew it was his chance. When she offered to lend him her own notes from when she’d taken the course, he knew the gods had smiled on him. She was clever and beautiful, and never once looked down on him for his trade, or for starting his degree long after the age when most people had finished theirs. Of course, they’d fallen in love. How could anyone not fall in love with her? She was wonderful. Even her natural shyness evaporated when they were together. She was light and life and everything good in the world, in one perfect woman.
He rolled over to dispel the memory, but it was useless. She was there again.
Ash as she was now. Older, sadder, faded. But still beautiful in her way. That exuberance had gone, and he wondered if her parents had killed it as surely as they’d killed his own dreams. But she was steady and mature, and eight years later, eight lonely years older himself, he found that appealed to him.
Or it would, if it weren’t her. He reminded himself that he hated her for what she’d done to him.
No matter what he did, she was there in his head. Laughing with him over a game of Trivial Pursuit when they were young, singing the songs she insisted on learning, even though lawyers don’t need to sing, sitting across from him at the table yesterday… All the images danced around each other, sometimes separate, sometimes merging into one, taunting him.
He gave up at three in the morning. He got up, went for another run, and finally collapsed into some sort of sleep at four, only to wake up bleary-eyed and exhausted at six.
It would not be a good day.
Any prospect of an easy time at work was decimated when Shelley poked her head around his office door.
“Good mo— Oh, God. You look awful. I’ll ask Peter to make more coffee. Poor guy, come to intern and all we do is have him make coffee. By the way, have you seen today’s papers? You’d better take a look, but wait ‘til I’m out of here. And don’t slam any more doors.”
She vanished before Marcus could form a coherent reply.
The grey fog of fatigue became a black cloud of doom as he opened his computer and pulled up the newspaper’s web page.
“Bloody hell!” he yelled to the walls. “What the blazes…?” He added a few more expletives as his brain took in and made sense of what he was reading. “Those damned women. Bloody Ashleigh. I bet her hands are all over this. A news conference? Damn them all.”
“Language, Marcus.” Shelley cracked the door open again. “Peter was afraid to come in here with your coffee. Black, no sugar, extra shot of espresso, because I think you need it. So, you saw the article.”
Marcus glowered at her. “You could have warned me they were going to hold a press conference. Now the media is involved, and it’s all about how this big, bad company is stealing precious playing space from poor, innocent, helpless children. Helpless, my ass. That area of town is prime real estate.”
Shelley put the cup on the desk and backed away a few steps.
“I hardly had warning myself. It’s not as if they asked my opinion. I only saw it this morning. But it’s not surprising, really. It was a natural next step.”
“They’re making us out to be monsters.”
“We are entirely within our rights… you are entirely in your rights to go ahead with the development as planned. The purchase is above board, the zoning permissions are in, there’s nothing fishy here at all.”
How did she remain so rational?
He took a sip of the coffee and let the hot bitter liquid coat his tongue and fire up his brain. He just breathed the aroma for a moment as he turned over her words.
