Carole Mortimer - Surrender to the Past

Ethan drew in a ragged breath. ‘Okay, let’s forget about our own relationship if it makes you happy—’

‘Oh, it does!’

‘But William is your father—’

‘Something—along with you and your mother—I’ve been trying to forget for the past five years!’ She turned her back on him to walk away, and sat down on a wooden bench looking out over the parkland. She was hoping that Ethan wouldn’t follow her, but was not altogether surprised when, after a few seconds’ hesitation, he walked that same short distance and sat on the other end of the bench.

The two of them sat in uneasy silence for several long minutes.

‘He didn’t report you missing but he—we certainly looked for you.’ Ethan finally broke that silence, his voice huskily soft.

‘Don’t bother with the “we”, Ethan,’ she cut in dryly. ‘My father may have been too lovestruck by your mother to have realised it, but I certainly know that it wasn’t in your best interests for me to be found.’

‘Another piece of your own unique logic?’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Once I had been removed from the equation it allowed both you and your mother to move in on my father.’

‘Damn you—’

‘No doubt,’ Mia accepted ruefully.

‘Okay, I can see there’s no reasoning with you on the subject of my mother or me—but what about your father?’

‘What about him?’

‘How could you just turn your back on him in that way?’ Ethan gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘William searched for you for months. Years! No lead was too small for him to follow up. No possible sighting of you too ridiculous for him to investigate.’

Mia didn’t so much as glance at him. ‘And to think that I never left London.’

‘You—?’ Ethan gave a disbelieving shake of his head. ‘You were here in the city all the time?’

‘Yes.’ She gave a humourless smile. ‘Don’t look so shocked,

Ethan; haven’t you heard that the best way to avoid detection by the enemy is by staying right under his nose!’

‘None of us were ever your enemy.’

‘No?’

‘No!’ Ethan eyed her in frustration. ‘Damn it!’ He began to pace. ‘So where exactly were you in London?’

Mia’s cheeks warmed at his obvious disgust. ‘I stayed with friends for the first couple of months.’

‘We—William contacted all of your friends to see if any of them had seen or heard from you and they all said they hadn’t!’

She raised her brows. ‘They were my friends, Ethan, not his.’

‘With friends like that …!’ His jaw tightened. ‘Where did you go after you left these so-called friends?’

‘I bought an apartment, took some classes, and then a couple of years ago I opened the coffee shop.’

‘What sort of classes? William checked every year with all the universities to see if you were attending any of them,’ he added with a frown.

‘I enrolled in a very reputable cookery school right here in London, Ethan,’ Mia announced with satisfaction.

‘Cookery school …? You actually bake the cookies in Coffee and Cookies yourself?’

She almost laughed at the disbelief in Ethan’s expression. Almost. But even knowing she had managed to totally bemuse the arrogant Ethan Black wasn’t enough reason for Mia to feel like laughing today. Nor was it reason enough to tell him that she not only baked cookies for her coffee shop but also for a couple of very upmarket specialist food stores in London …

‘My maternal grandmother, as well as leaving me the hefty trust fund that my father so conveniently signed over to me on my eighteenth birthday, also taught me to bake. I’m good at it,’ she added defensively as Ethan just continued to stare at her.

‘I’m sure that you are.’ Ethan finally nodded slowly. ‘But it’s a drastic change from the economics you were studying before you dropped out.’

She grimaced. ‘That was always my father’s choice, not mine.’

‘Because he expected you to take over Burton Industries one day?’

‘Probably,’ Mia acknowledged. ‘How lucky for him that you came along so conveniently to fill the breach.’

Ethan drew in a hissing breath. ‘Bitter and twisted doesn’t suit you, Mia.’

Her eyes flashed a deep dark green. ‘This is me being a realist, Ethan, not bitter and twisted.’

‘You closed your bank account two days after you left. We all thought you must have gone abroad somewhere.’

Mia gave another shrug. ‘Because that’s what you were all supposed to believe.’

‘That was unbelievably cruel, Mia.’

Her eyes glittered. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

‘Oh, believe me, I’m learning fast,’ Ethan assured her grimly.

Mia fell silent, not looking at Ethan but at the people in the park—some walking their dogs, others taking their children home from school. All such everyday occurrences, sights and people Mia saw every day whenever she came to the park to eat her lunch, and yet Ethan’s presence here made this totally unlike a normal day for her …

She turned to look at him where he sat on the other end of the bench, her heart tightening in her chest at the bleakness of his expression as he stared straight back at her.

He was more attractive than he had ever been, Mia grudgingly admitted. Those outward signs of maturity gave him a dangerous edge and that aura of arrogant self-confidence only added to the impression of danger.

Her chin rose. ‘I forgot to congratulate you earlier. On your promotion,’ she explained at Ethan’s questioning glance. ‘It was announced in the newspapers several months ago that you were made CEO of Burton Industries.’

He looked at her through narrowed lids. ‘And did you also see in the newspapers the circumstances under which I became CEO of the company?’

Mia turned away from that piercing silver gaze. ‘Because my father had a heart attack.’

‘You knew William had been ill?’ Ethan stared at her incredulously.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed flatly.

‘And yet you still didn’t go to see him?’ Ethan made no effort to hide his disgust now. Mia had known—all the time she had known about William’s heart attack—and she hadn’t even bothered to telephone her father, let alone go to see him …

Her sighed heavily. ‘Obviously not.’

‘What if he had died, Mia, and you never saw him again?’

Mia tried not to shudder at the thought. As much as her father had hurt her badly, she still questioned whether she had done the right thing. But Ethan didn’t need to know that, so she shrugged. ‘I have no intention of ever seeing him again.’

‘And what if I were to tell you that it was another erroneous sighting of you that caused his heart attack?’

‘It’s been five years, Ethan—don’t try and lay that guilt trip on me!’

‘Five years or fifty—your father will never stop loving you. Never stop looking for you!’

Her expression remained unrelenting. ‘I’m not, nor have I ever been—obviously!—answerable for anything my father may or may not choose to do.’

Ethan looked at her for several long, tense seconds before standing up abruptly. ‘I’m wasting my time even trying to talk to you, aren’t I?’ It was more a flat statement than a question.

‘I’m glad you’ve finally realised that.’ Mia looked up at him unemotionally.

He gave a shake of his head. ‘Obviously the changes in you aren’t just on the surface, but go all the way to your selfish and bitter little heart!’

‘How dare you …?’ Mia gasped.

Ethan looked down at her as if he had never seen her before. ‘You were so beautiful, so sweet and trusting—’

‘Well, I certainly had that knocked out of me, didn’t I?’ She eyed him wearily.

‘Are you referring to me or to your father now?’

‘Both!’

‘Forget about me—’

‘Oh, let’s!’

Ethan gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘William did everything for you. Loved you. Damn it, he adored you—’

‘And then he betrayed everything I believed about him by having an affair with your mother!’ Mia finished heatedly as she stood up to face him. ‘And just because the two of them finally married each other it doesn’t make your mother any more my stepmother than it makes you my stepbrother! None of those things changes the fact that long before my mother died my father was involved in an affair with your own mother.’

‘It wasn’t like that. You make it sound so—’

‘Sordid?’ she suggested. ‘Maybe that’s because it was sordid. My mother was in a wheelchair for the last four years of her life, and all the time my father and your mother—’

‘I’ve told you—it wasn’t all the time.’ His eyes glittered. ‘They didn’t even know each other until after you started attending Southlands School.’

Mia gave an inelegant snort. ‘You really expect me to believe that?’

‘I’m telling you how it was—’

‘And beware anyone who dares to disbelieve the arrogant and powerful Ethan Black?’ She eyed him mockingly.

‘This isn’t about me, Mia. And it isn’t about you, either,’ he added grimly, cutting her off as she was about to speak. ‘Yes, your father and my mother made the mistake of falling in love with each other while your father was still married, but they didn’t do anything about those feelings until after your mother died. I know you would rather believe otherwise, but—’

‘My God, I can’t believe you actually fell for any of that sanctimonious rubbish they spouted after my mother died.’ She looked at him with pity. ‘That whole story of how the two of them fell in love but fought against their feelings! I always gave you credit for having more intelligence than to believe something so lame, Ethan.’

He eyed her derisively. ‘From what I’ve observed of the emotion, intelligence has very little to do with falling in love.’

‘The two of them were together on the day my mother killed herself, Ethan,’ she continued fiercely. ‘They were together at your mother’s house while my mother sat at home and downed a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of wine!’

He winced. ‘Your mother didn’t even know about their friendship.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’ Mia scorned. ‘She didn’t so much as leave a note, so how can anyone know what my mother was thinking when she swallowed that bottle of pills?’

Ethan hesitated, thinking of the promise William had extracted from both himself and his mother never to tell Mia of the real circumstances behind her mother’s death, or the letter Kay had left for him. It was a promise they had both kept for the past five years. But at what price …?

He bit back his frustration. ‘I’m sorry your mother did what she did, but you have to believe that it had nothing to do with the friendship that existed between my mother and your father.’

‘I don’t have to believe anything, Ethan.’ Her face had paled to a ghostly white.

Damn it, Ethan hadn’t come here to hurt Mia. Just like William, Ethan had never wanted to do that. ‘Mia, I know how you must have felt—still feel—’

‘You don’t know anything about me, Ethan!’ Mia shook her head. ‘Certainly not how I felt then. Or how I still and will always feel about the circumstances of my mother’s death.’

‘Maybe that’s because you refused all my attempts to see you after she died?’ Ethan reminded her harshly.

Of course Mia had refused to see Ethan again after her mother had died and her father’s affair with Ethan’s mother had made front-page headlines in every newspaper in the country. How could she have done anything else, behaved in any other way, when the knowledge of that affair had shown her all too clearly the unfolding of past events and the reasons for them? All of them. Including the reason for her own brief relationship with Ethan.