Owed: One Wedding Night

Chapter Three

Madison worked to conceal her nervousness, and her grief, as the salesman inspected her beloved Ferrari in the mildly noxious air of the “previously owned” imported car lot.

Two days after her dinner with Jake, she’d accepted that she was out of other options. At least for now.

Once the salesman had checked under the hood and gone over the pristine red paint job, he slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine roared to life, then purred contentedly, forcing Madison to step away from smell of the exhaust. He pushed in the clutch and ran the shifter through the gears before he left it in neutral, climbed out and stood a moment watching the fine gray smoke that came out its tailpipe. Then he walked back around and reached inside to turn off the key, which he handed to her with a little shake of his head.

She could see the little “no” sign in his right eye and “sale” in his left, like an old cartoon.

“It's in great shape for a vintage car.” He ran a beefy hand through his hair. “Wish I could take it off your hands, but who knows how long it would sit on the lot before someone showed up who could afford to buy it. I can’t tie up that kind of money in slow-moving inventory.”

“What if I offered five percent above the usual commission?”

The man leaned back against the fender of the dark-blue Bentley parked next to her car and stared at his shoes, obviously doing a few quick calculations in his head.

“Nope. I could take it on consignment for you.”

“I'm afraid that won’t work.”

Madison needed the money now. Her trust fund was running low. An infusion of cash from selling the Ferrari, as much as it would break her heart, would stretch her inheritance out a few months longer. Maybe long enough for her to find new financing for Dartmoor.

“Can you refer me to other imported car dealers in the area who might be interested in buying it?”

The man shook his head. “Don’t think there’s anyone who can do more than I can, but I’ll email you a list.” He took her business card. “I'm sorry. It’s a great little vehicle.”

She nodded, climbed into the car, and backed carefully out of the lot while her mind sorted through what few options she had left. She quickly discarded the idea of putting the car up for sale on the internet. She’d never get the kind of money it was really worth.

She refused to admit to a flicker of relief that she could keep the car she loved after all.

Jake stretched, then linked his fingers behind his head. Across the conference table his personal assistant typed data into a spreadsheet, her shiny black hair bouncing slightly as she nodded over the numbers.

For maybe the hundredth time in the two years she’d worked for him, he wondered why he liked Astrid so much, enjoyed her company so much, found her attractive and yet felt zero, less than zero, sexual attraction for her.

And she’d made it clear she had the same reaction to him.

The exact opposite of Madison. Even after all that had happened, he could barely think of her without wanting her. A reaction that had only gotten worse in the two days since their dinner at the Yacht Club. She was like a drug – one he needed to resist or risk ending up like his father.

His cell buzzed. “Number unknown.” He had nothing to do while Astrid ran the data, so he took the call.

Five minutes later he clicked the phone off and stared out window, absently drumming his fingers on the table.

“What?” Astrid looked up with a frown of annoyance.

“Nothing.”

“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t make that irritating noise so I’d need to ask about it."

He quieted his fingers. This wasn't something he could discuss with Astrid, but she was right. He needed to talk about it with someone. If only his father…

But relationships hadn’t been his father’s strong point, either.

He stood to pace across the room and stare at the portraits of his father and grandfather that hung on the wall by the door. But he wasn't seeing them. He was seeing Madison’s face the day he handed her the keys to the Ferrari. The tears in her eyes hadn’t been because of the car itself – it wasn’t until later that she’d come to love it so much – but because he’d known her well enough to buy her exactly what she’d wanted most. Because he’d loved her that much.

Now she was trying to sell the car. The salesman who called hadn’t realized it was the same car Jake had bought from his company four years ago, but had thought Jake might be interested in a matched set of the rare vintage cars for himself and his “wife.” A distress sale, the man said, so Jake would get a good deal on it.

Which didn’t resolve the question of whether Madison was selling the Ferrari to break the last tie between them, or was in more dire financial straits than he’d imagined.

He waited until he and Astrid had the numbers crunched, then picked up his phone, fingers shaking like an addict as he punched in Madison’s cell number.

She hadn’t changed it. The sound of her voice, the stress he heard in her “Hello,” left him momentarily speechless.

He swallowed. “Hey.”

“Who is this?”

“Me. Jake.”

She drew in a sharp breath. “What do you want?”

He almost said, “A second chance.” At what he wasn't sure.

“I was a jerk,” was safer.

“There’s a news bulletin.”

He ignored the prick of irritation. “I shouldn’t have said I’d look at your plan and then brush you off. I’d like to make it up to you.”

He wasn’t sure what response he’d expected, but not the hollow sound in her voice.

“What do you have in mind?”

Nothing, right at the moment.

“Can you come by the office this afternoon? I'll go over your plan and see if there’s some way I can arrange a small bridge loan for you.”

“Really?"

“I owe you.’

“All on the up and up?”

He probably deserved that, but it still rankled.

“I said I owe you.”

“Would three o’clock work?”

Once they’d set a time he cleared his calendar and did two or three hours of work in a little over an hour.

Which left him no time to wonder why he would even consider lending money to a failing business in an industry he knew nothing about.

Madison had dreaded a repeat of the walk down the corridor to Jake’s office, but when she found him waiting for her by the elevators it only fed her suspicions about what new game he might be playing.

He made pleasant small-talk as they went through to his office, where he sat her at the large conference table and waited with a politely expectant smile, as if she were a total stranger.

He didn't seem to notice the way her hands shook as she opened the leather briefcase and took out her tablet computer. He listened to the presentation she’d so carefully prepared, then he shuffled through the printouts she’d brought to back up her cost estimates and income projections. She fought the urge to squirm while Jake read Dartmoor’s latest audit.

That was the most recent financial data she’d been able to get without telling anyone at Dartmoor about her appointment with Jake. She still didn’t want to build anyone's hopes up. Of course, things would be much worse now the ex-CFO had cashed in her golden parachute, but the auditor’s report was bad enough.

After what felt like a very long time, Jake lifted his head and gave her a look she couldn’t quite decipher.

“Your father really messed up, didn’t he?”

She bridled, surprised at the impulse to defend the man who was responsible for this whole nasty situation.

“He didn’t exercise proper oversight, no.”

“Why’d he hire such an incompetent CFO in the first place?”

“She was supposedly brilliant at another chain.”

Jake opened a file with the woman’s beautiful, cold face. Madison turned her head away.

“It's a long step from financial analyst to CFO, but I’d guess her business skills weren’t the real reason your father hired her.”

“Let’s refocus on my plan, shall we?”

“How successful your plan will be depends on what kind of resources Dartmoor has to carry it out.”

She wondered what was going on behind the polite mask he’d worn ever since he greeted her, but the face she’d once been able to read like a book was closed to her.

“That’s why I included the audit. It’s out of date, but the numbers can give you a rough idea of our current financial situation.”

“‘Rough’ describes your situation pretty well.”

She swallowed a sharp retort. She’d expected him to be a little gentler in his comments. He’d called the meeting, after all. It was as if just being near her irritated him, the same way being near him made her nerves dance along the jagged edge between grief, anger, and desire.

He set the papers aside. “Remind me of how much money you want, exactly.”

She took the tablet and shuffled through her slideshow to the screen with the final figures, then gave it back to him.

“With that I could do the most important updates at one of our stores. Once it’s clear the updates can make it profitable again, we can obtain more financing from our usual sources to roll them out in our other locations.”

“Your mother must have other assets she can sell to raise the capital you need.”

Here it came. Madison squared her shoulders and shifted back in her chair.

“My father dug himself in deeper than you think. He’d been quietly selling mother’s other assets over the last few years to balance the books at Dartmoor. Shortly before he died, he even sold the condo here in town and moved in with his mistress-slash-CFO.”

Jake swore, quietly but colorfully. She didn’t blame him.

“Your mother had no clue?”

“Mother left my dad right after…when he stopped speaking to me. She didn’t have any say in what he did as long as she stayed married to him, in any case. Grandfather Moore left everything in a trust, with my father as trustee.”

“Which would explain why your mother didn’t divorce him.”

“That, and the fact that she never stopped loving him.”

Jake swore again. He knew enough about unhappy marriages from his own parents’ to understand why Madison’s eyes clouded over with a lifetime of little sorrows.

He scrolled through the presentation and pretended to go over the numbers again while he wondered what he’d gotten himself into and how to get himself out of it. In his eagerness to solve Madison’s problem for her, he’d made two major miscalculations.

The first was that Dartmoor’s financial situation was much worse than he’d expected. He saw no way to justify a direct loan for Dartmoor to the Board at Carlyle’s. He’d be as bad as her father if he based it on nothing more than his feelings for Madison, whatever those feelings were. And he didn’t have enough liquidity to raise the cash from his other holdings for a personal loan. He hated it that he couldn’t help her.

His other big mistake was underestimating how strong his feelings for Madison still were. Their dinner together had been about closure, moving on with his life. He’d quickly learned what a stupid illusion that had been. He doubted now there was any way in the world to get this woman out of his system.

Even now his body hummed with wanting her, despite the opposite-of-sexy conversation, but the last hour had reminded him of all there was to how he felt about her besides sex. The delicate scent of her perfume calmed him at the same time it aroused him. He wished he was able to drink in the sound of her voice so he could hear it when she wasn’t there. Her every move, the shape of her hands, her rare smiles intoxicated him.

Not to mention the psychic slap to the head he’d gotten once he realized how clever her plans for Dartmoor really were. She was damned good at what she did.

Absently he flipped through the screenshots. A stray fact he’d missed caught his eye.

“Why does my mother own ten percent of Dartmoor?”

Madison gave a rueful laugh. “My father talked your father into buying it while you and I were engaged. At one point my dad owned a small share in Carlyle & Sons, too. I guess your dad held on after we didn’t…” She gestured vaguely with her ringless left hand.

Something clicked in Jake’s brain. Madison’s mother owned sixty percent of the company. Madison held another ten percent, as did his mother and two other shareholders.

The pieces fell into place – how he’d be able to help Madison. How he’d be able to have her back in his bed, in his life, which, he saw with stunning clarity, had been his goal all along.

How he’d be able to do it all, have it all, without letting her know how much her desertion had hurt him, or how badly she could hurt him again.

It was a gamble, a big one, but one he was willing to take.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “but there isn’t enough here to justify a loan from Carlyle’s.”

Instead of slumping back in defeat as he’d expected, she sat straighter and leaned toward him. “If you can loan me half the amount, I might be able to raise the rest from friends.”

“No.”

“A personal loan?”

He shook his head. “Not possible.”

A momentary wave of grief crossed her face, but she quickly hid it. Methodically she closed her tablet and gathered her papers, then put them neatly into her briefcase. She looked at him one last time, as if to gauge whether to say more, but he kept his feelings carefully masked. She pushed her chair away from the table.

Timing, keeping her slightly off-balance, was vital. She was half out of the chair when he allowed his voice to soften and said, “Madi.”

Madison sat down and lifted her chin. She didn’t trust the expression on Jake’s face.

“There might be a way.”

Now she really didn’t trust his expression. “How?”

“What if I bought two-thirds of your mother’s shares in Dartmoor?”

He cited a number that made her tense her jaw to stop it from dropping open.

“That should give you the capital to update two or three of the stores,” he added.

“I thought you couldn’t come up with that kind of money.”

“Not as a loan. But as an investment it would be worth borrowing against some of my other holdings.”

“But what if you lost it all!”

He looked as surprised as she was at her reaction, then gave her a slow grin.

“I'd still be, as you put it before, ‘filthy rich’.”

She cringed at the reminder while her pulse raced. There might be a way to save Dartmoor after all!

But the expression on Jake’s face still worried her. She ran through the numbers in her head and found the trap.

“Two-thirds of Mother’s share is forty percent of Dartmoor. With your mother’s share, you’d own fifty percent.”

He chuckled. “That gives me a lot more control over what my mother does than I’m likely to have. Besides, you, your mother, and the other current shareholders will have fifty percent, too.”

“Which might lead to a deadlocked board.”

He leaned closer and put his hand over hers. She resisted the urge to pull away, but his touch sent a shockwave of need through her system that played havoc with her concentration.

“Let’s not assume the worse. We can always put something into the legal papers that would allow you to buy part of my share if the Board should ever be deadlocked.”

More was going on behind those bright-blue eyes. She was sure of it. If she could just think more clearly. She wiggled her hand slightly to free it from the mesmerizing effect of his touch. Slowly her head cleared enough to see the flaw in his plan, draining the glow from the possibilities in front of her.

“If we reinvest all the money you give us into Dartmoor, what will Mother live on?”

He released her hand and made a sweeping gesture. “You could invest some of it elsewhere to provide her with a decent income. But that probably wouldn’t leave enough to make the difference in Dartmoor’s bottom line. You need to attract outside financing.”

Dark suspicions swarmed into her mind. She could hear her grandfather say, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

“Ah, so there’s a catch. What more do you want from us, besides the shares? You wouldn't do this simply to make up for dinner the other night. Or out of friendship.”

“The ‘catch,’ as you put it, is that I want you to marry me.”

“What? Are you crazy?”

He reacted more quickly than she did. The bland mask lifted for only a moment to reveal the flash of anger and hurt in his eyes before it fell back into place.

“That’s not how you reacted the last time I asked you to marry me. If I remember, you were very pleased. You even cried. It was quite touching, actually. Fooled me completely.”

Her head already in a spin, she grasped the arms of her chair to help anchor herself in some sort of reality.

“Fooled you?”

“I thought you loved me.”

Her heart twisted. She closed her eyes against the bitterness of his words.

“I d–d-did love you.”

He brushed the confession away. “And how long did that last?”

Hurt almost beyond bearing, she hid the wound behind the anger that was her only protection against this man.

“Until you tried to take over my life. Choosing between my dream of running Dartmoor someday and being your trophy wife wasn’t much of a choice. Certainly not one a man would force on a woman he loved.”

If some weak part of her hoped he’d respond to her charge as she responded to his, she was doomed to disappointment.

“We've had this conversation,” he said instead. “You misinterpreted a chance remark and used that as an excuse to walk out on me.”

Anger roared in her ears. She struggled to calm the pounding in her heart and the churning in her stomach.

“So that’s what your little joke was all about. Well, you've had your laugh. Can we let it go now?”

She half-stood again, but he stopped her.

“Joke?”

She didn’t sit down again this time. She wasn’t staying.

“About us getting married.”

“It wasn’t a joke."

She still didn’t sit. She fell into the chair, legs too wobbly to hold her. Was this a dream? A nightmare?

“Why?” she asked in a raw voice.

He leaned toward her again. This time she had no urge to pull away, the sexual tug of his nearness no longer a threat. Or was it?

“I like you, you like me. We used to be friends. And we were great together in bed. Why not get married? You’re CEO of Dartmoor, so no one can accuse you of being a trophy wife.”

“I don’t see why this would be a better deal for you than simply buying Mother’s shares.”

He gave her the wicked grin she knew so well. “Did you hear the part about great sex?”

Her emotions did a U-turn so fast she felt dizzy. She pushed herself to her feet, hoping her quivering knees would hold her.

“I’m not for sale, Jake.” She headed for the door.

“Whoa!”

She kept walking.

“Not what I meant at all. It’s the whole package, Madi.”

The nickname was what made her stop. Made her hope.

“Friends, good sex, and I can help your mother out without having to explain it to anyone as a business decision.”

And maybe you could learn to love me again. Not a good way to think right now. She needed to focus on the facts here, not go chasing rainbows.

But Jake had the facts on his side, too. Once her inheritance ran out, she and her mother would be homeless, unless Madison left Dartmoor and took a job somewhere else. Even then, it would take her a few years to earn enough to support the kind of life her mother had always led.

And they’d have to close Dartmoor. After putting up with a philandering husband her whole marriage to keep the family business alive, her mother would lose everything.

And all the employees who’d made Dartmoor what it was would lose their jobs. Her grandfather’s voice again, reminding her this was about more families than hers.

All she had to do to prevent everyone from being hurt was marry the man she loved. Except, if she did that, she’d have to put her heart on the line, risk the pain of a loveless marriage her mother had lived with for years.

Madison wasn’t sure she could do it. She wasn’t sure she had any other choice.

She turned to face Jake. His careful mask told her nothing, but his blue eyes pierced through the center of hers, into her heart.

She held her head high as she walked back to the chair and sat down. “Give me the details of what would go into the pre-nup.”

An emotion she couldn’t name flickered across his face and disappeared.

“The usual. What’s mine stays mine and what’s yours stays yours. A clause about spousal support in case of divorce.”

She clenched her jaw against a stab of pain, if not surprise, at his lack of faith in her business savvy.

“I won’t need spousal support. Not after Dartmoor starts turning a profit again.”

“What if I’m the one who needs it?”

The grin he gave her felt like sunshine after months of San Francisco fog. Her heart opened to the light like a flower.

This was not only the man she loved, he was also a man she could trust. He was nothing like her father. Even if she had no other choice, marrying Jake felt right.

As if he felt the shift in the air between them, he took her hand in his. The warmth of his touch burned from her skin down to parts of her she’d half-forgotten existed.

“Just to make it official,” he said, “will you marry me?”

She blinked hard to stop the unexpected threat of tears – half joy, half fear. He must never know how much she still loved him.

“Just to make it official, Yes.”

The simmering sexual tension between him and Madison built while they sketched out a pre-nup and the contract for Jake’s purchase of her mother’s shares. By the time all the basics were set and he’d emailed them to his attorney, his body ached with wanting Madison.

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