She’d thought his relationship with the middle-aged Rosa had been excellent. She’d often heard him describe Rosa as the backbone of the business and how he would be lost without her. Why on earth would he have fired her? ‘Really? Why?’
He worked his way through the gears with an almost savage intensity. ‘She overstepped the mark. I fired her. End of story.’
‘Overstepped it in what way?’
He sent her a speaking glance. ‘Could we leave this until another time?’
Ailsa bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry... I know you’re feeling stressed and this must be so upsetting for you with your grandfather so desperately ill...’
There was a long silence.
‘He’s all I have,’ Vinn said in the same hollow-sounding voice he’d used back in his office. ‘I’m not ready to lose him.’
She wanted to reach for his hand or to put her hand on his thigh the way she used to do, but instead she kept to her side of the car. He probably wouldn’t welcome her comfort or he might push her away, which would be even worse. ‘You still have your dad, don’t you?’ she said.
‘No.’ He made another gear change. ‘He died. Car crash. He was driving under the influence and killed himself and his new girlfriend and seriously injured a couple and their two children travelling in the other car.’
‘I’m so sorry...’ Ailsa said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
It pained her to think Vinn had gone through such a tragic loss since she’d left and she’d known nothing about it. She hadn’t even sent a card or flowers. Had he kept his dad’s death out of the press? Not that she went looking for news about Vinn and his family...well, not unless she’d had one too many glasses of wine late at night when she was feeling particularly lonely and miserable.
He shrugged off her sympathy. ‘He was on a fast track to disaster from the moment my mother died when I was a child. Without her steadying influence he was a train wreck waiting to happen.’
Ailsa had rarely heard Vinn mention his mother’s death. It was something he never spoke of, even in passing. But she knew his relationship with his father had never truly recovered after his father was charged with fraud when Vinn was barely out of his teens. The shame on the family’s name and the reputation of the bespoke furniture business had been hard to come back from, but coming back from it had been Vinn’s blood, sweat and tears mission and he had done it, building the company into a global success.
‘I guess not everyone gets to have a father-of-the-year dad,’ she said, sighing as he turned into the entrance of the hospital. ‘Both of us lucked out on that one.’
Vinn had pulled into a parking spot and glanced at her again with a frown. ‘What do you mean? You’ve got a great dad. Michael’s one of the most decent, hardworking men I’ve ever met.’
Ailsa wanted to kick herself. She even lifted one foot to do it, welcoming the stab of pain from her high heel because she was a fool to let her guard slip. A damn fool.
‘Yes...yes, I know. He’s wonderful...even since the divorce he still makes an effort to—’
‘Then why say something like that? He’ll always be your dad even though he’s divorced from your mother.’
‘Forget I said it. I... I wasn’t thinking.’ Ailsa hated that she sounded so flustered and hoped he’d put it down to the emotion of seeing his grandfather under such tense and potentially tragic circumstances. She had a feeling if he hadn’t been in such a rush to see his grandfather before the surgery he might well have pushed her to explain herself a little more. It was a reprieve, but how long before he came back to it with his dog-with-a-bone determination?
It was a timely reminder she would have to be careful around Vinn. He knew her in a way few people did. Her knew her body like a maestro did an instrument. He knew her moods, her likes and dislikes, her tendency to use her sharp tongue as a weapon when she got cornered.
He didn’t know her shameful secret, but how soon before he made it his business to find out?
VINN DIDN’T KNOW what was worse—seeing Ailsa again without a little more notice or walking into the hospital to see his grandfather, possibly for the last time. But, in a way, he’d been expecting to lose his grandfather...eventually. But two years ago when Ailsa called time on their marriage it had not only blindsided him but hit him in the chest like a freight train. Sure, they argued a bit now and again. What newly married couple didn’t?
But he’d never thought she’d leave him.
They hadn’t even made it to the first anniversary. For some reason that annoyed him more than anything else. He had given her everything money could buy. He had showered her with gifts and jewellery. Surrounded her with luxury and comfort, as was fitting for the wife of a successful man. He might not have loved her the way most wives expected to be loved, but she hadn’t married him for love either. Lust was what brought them together and he’d been perfectly fine with that and so had she, or so he’d thought. She had never said the words and he hadn’t fished for them. He’d just assumed she would be happy with the arrangement because most women wanted security over everything else and the one thing he was good at was providing financial security. Financial security was what you could bank on—pardon the pun—because emotions were fickle. People were fickle.
But Ailsa had been unwilling to even discuss the subject of having a child. He knew her career was important to her, as was his to him, but surely she could have been mature enough to sit down and discuss it like an adult? He’d told her he wasn’t all that interested in having a family when they’d first got together because back then he wasn’t. But after a few months of marriage, his grandfather had his first health scare with his liver and had spoken to Vinn privately about his desire for a grandchild to hold in his arms before he died. He had made it sound like Vinn would be letting down the family name by not providing an heir. That it would be a failure on Vinn’s part not to secure the family business for future generations.
Letting the family down.
Failure.
With his father already the Gagliardi family’s big failure, those words haunted Vinn. They stalked him in quiet moments. It reminded him of how close to losing everything he had been when his father had jeopardised everything with his fraudulent behaviour. Vinn couldn’t allow himself to fail at anything. Being an only child had never really bothered him before then, but with his father acting like a born-again teenager at that time and his grandfather rapidly ageing, it had made Vinn think more and more about the future. Who would he leave his vast wealth to? What was the point of working so hard if you had no one to pass on your legacy to when you left this mortal coil?
But no, practically as soon as he’d brought up the topic, Ailsa had stormed out of his life like a petulant child, refusing to communicate with him except through their respective lawyers. She had dropped another failure on him—their marriage. He would give her the divorce when it suited him and not a moment before. He had far more pressing priorities and top of that list was getting his grandfather through this surgery.
Vinn was banking on Ailsa’s love for her younger brother Isaac to get her to agree to his plan for the next three months. But her turning up unannounced at his
