Page 136 of Talking Dirty with the Billionaire Boss

I sit back, shaking my head. I’m trembling again. Oh my God…

“No wonder he forgave you for spying on him,” she says. “He gets very angry about the cost of unfunded drugs in this country. If anyone was going to convince him to forgive you, it was telling him about your dad.”

“Is he for real?” I whisper. “I can’t believe he’s so…” I want to say magnificent, but I’m too embarrassed.

She smiles. “Yes, he’s for real. He’s an old-fashioned philanthropist. He genuinely wants to help people and fight the system. He’s laser-focused on his goals and he works incredibly hard. He’s not perfect though, just so you know.”

I give a short laugh. “I’m sure.”

“You know he’s a year younger than the rest of us? They put him up a year at high school and he went to university at seventeen.”

“Yes, he did tell me.”

“I think a combination of that, and the fact that he’s possibly on the spectrum, just a little, means he’s sort of… I don’t know, boyish, you know? Huxley’s the same, in a way, and Titus, they’re all as bad as each other. They think because women like having sex with them that they’re all grown up, but none of them has a clue about relationships really. Mack’s going to fuck up from time to time, but it’s only because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

I smile. I really like Elizabeth. She’s such a nice person, managing to be beautiful and feminine and gentle and kind, and yet smart and easily able to hold her own amongst all these confident men. “So you nominated him for the award because of that research?” I ask.

She nods. “The MacDiarmid Medal. It’s run by the Royal Society, and it’s a prestigious award for outstanding scientific research. He’d absolutely walk it. But he’s very cross that I nominated him, as you saw. He wants me to withdraw it.”

“Will you?”

She laughs. “No. He deserves to win. But he won’t go to the awards dinner. I don’t even know if he’ll accept the award if he does win. He might return it, and that would be a shame. The work deserves the publicity. It’s not all about him. But he feels under the spotlight, and he’s not comfortable there.”

“When’s the award dinner?”

“Next Friday.” She clicks her pen on and off. “You know about his father, right?”

“I know his dad died from prostate cancer.”

“Yeah, because he couldn’t get the drugs. My grandfather was the same, only it was bowel cancer in his case. It’s why we’ve both been so focused on this. It was very late when Mack’s dad was diagnosed—he died within six months of the diagnosis. Mack was at university. He was devastated.”

I lean forward on the table. “You know his mother was Scottish?”

“Yeah.”

“He came to New Zealand when he was twelve, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what happened in Scotland?”

She plays with her pen, maybe deciding how much she should reveal. “You should really ask him.”

“I will. I don’t want to get you into any more trouble. But I just feel it would help me to understand him.”

She sighs. “I know his father went to the UK on vacation when he was young. He met Mack’s mother, and they had a brief fling. I’m not sure but I suspect she asked him to stay in Scotland with her, but he said he couldn’t leave New Zealand forever. He returned here. She then discovered she was pregnant with Mack, but never told him. After she’d had Mack, she then hooked up with another guy and had Jamie. As far as I understand it, there were a few more guys after that.”

I frown. “What happened then?”

“All I know is that Mack found his father online and wrote to him. Shortly afterward, his father and his grandfather—I think you’ve met him—landed in the UK, took Mack and Jamie away, and brought them back to New Zealand.”

My eyes widen. “With their mother’s permission?”

“I believe so. It went through the courts anyway, and she didn’t contest it. I don’t know any more than that, sorry. Hux or Victoria might, I’m not sure, but I doubt they’d tell you. Those three have always been pretty tight.”

My mind is whirling again. Something must have happened in Scotland to make Mack track down his father. Did he ask him to come and get him? And why did his mother—Iona, I’m guessing—let him go?

“I’ve never seen him like this with anyone else,” she says, smiling. “I’ve always thought that he doesn’t trust women. So it says something about how crazy he is about you.”

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