Emma Darcy: The Master Player

‘Laura didn’t suck you in, did she?’ Tony asked anxiously. ‘You didn’t shell out a lot of money to her?’

She slowly raised her gaze from the documents to look directly at him. ‘No. I thought you should. Which is why we’re here.’

His face sagged with relief. ‘At least she didn’t do us that damage.’

It sounded as though he was wiping all fault from himself and Chloe was not about to accept that, eyeing him coldly as she pointed out, ‘You put us in this position, Tony. You gave her the power to play this game.’

‘Do you think I haven’t cursed myself a thousand times for falling into her trap?’ he pleaded.

‘Laura said you seduced her.’

‘Well, she would say that to you, wouldn’t she?’ he scoffed. ‘It served her purpose. Just as it served her purpose to hang out availability signals to me from day one of working for you. Flirtatious looks. Sexy double entendres. The occasional brush past. A whole stack of sly temptations. I laughed it off for months. I didn’t want her.’

Again he leaned forward earnestly, his blue eyes begging her understanding. ‘I had you, Chloe. I didn’t want Laura Farrell. Even when she was doing it to me I told myself I should be stopping her, but I’d had too much to drink at the party and…’ He raked his hands through his hair in an anguished manner. ‘I tell you, Chloe, she’s a female predator. I was coming out of the bathroom. She pushed me back in, had me unzipped in a flash, went down on me and…’

‘Spare me the details!’ Chloe snapped.

‘I’m sorry…sorry…I’m just trying to explain how it was, how I never meant it to happen. I love you,’ he cried emphatically.

Anger flared at the way he was twisting things again. Whether Laura had seduced him or the other way around didn’t really matter because it hadn’t stopped in that bathroom. Her eyes savagely mocked any excuse for his continued infidelity.

‘Don’t tell me this was a once only lapse on your part, Tony. I know it wasn’t.’

‘What did Laura tell you?’ he quickly countered.

Chloe shot down any more lies before he could come up with them. ‘My mother told me. She dismissed the affair as unimportant. The affair, Tony. Not a one-night stand.’

Chloe could see him recalculating, knowing he was under the gun with Stephanie Rollins’s sharp eyes never missing anything. It wouldn’t suit her purpose to plead his cause so he had to give the affair a forgivable twist.

‘All right,’ he conceded with a self-deprecating grimace. ‘Laura knew how to work sex to get to me and it did. Any man would have taken what she was giving out. I’m only human, Chloe. But it made me feel guilty as hell and in the end I did stop it because I cared about our marriage and didn’t want her messing with it.’

She wondered if Max would have taken what Laura could do with sex. Obviously Tony had found it more exciting than what he’d had at home. Was sex more important to men than love? Perhaps the reason why Max had never married was because sex with the one woman got boring after a while, and he preferred to remain free to go after something new and exciting when the urge took him.

Like with her.

A wave of depression rolled through Chloe. She didn’t want to listen to anymore. There was no need to fight for child support on Laura Farrell’s behalf. The business of this meeting was over. She looked bleakly at the man she had married with blind faith in love and spoke what she knew to be the truth.

‘You didn’t want to lose your cash cow, Tony.’

His face flushed an ugly red. ‘Those are Laura’s words, not mine. She was determined on alienating you from me, Chloe, but she’s out of our lives now. No baby for her to hang onto me. That’s all behind us.’ Again his hands reached out in appeal. ‘I’m begging you to forgive me. Give us another chance.’

She shook her head, pushed her chair back and stood up, turning to the two lawyers. ‘Thank you for your services in clarifying the situation with Laura Farrell.’

All three men rose to their feet, Tony rushing into more urgent speech. ‘Please think about it, Chloe. We had a good marriage before this. I know you wanted a baby and I put it off but I won’t if you give us another chance. I promise you…’

Chloe had no doubt he would keep that promise. A baby was the best string of all to hold her to their marriage. But she vividly remembered how he’d treated Luther-a baby dog-and she couldn’t see Tony as a good father. Nor as a good husband for her. He never had been.

‘This meeting is over,’ she stated flatly. ‘It wasn’t about us, Tony.’

‘But surely you now realise I was Laura’s victim, just as John Flaherty was,’ he pleaded. ‘You’re letting her win, Chloe.’

‘No. She didn’t get anything out of this.’ Except the five hundred dollars, which would have been peanuts in her overall scheme.

‘She got the satisfaction of breaking us up,’ Tony vehemently argued.

Oddly enough, Chloe now felt Laura Farrell had done her a favour-the catalyst for breaking up a lot of bad things in her life. ‘I’ve moved on, Tony. There’s no going back,’ she said firmly.

An angry red flushed his face this time. ‘I can forgive you Max Hart. He took advantage of the situation.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m leaving now. I’d appreciate it-’ she glanced at Tony’s lawyer ‘-if you and your client remain in this boardroom until I’ve gone.’

The lawyer nodded. ‘Understood, Miss Rollins.’

‘Chloe…’ Tony persisted pleadingly.

She turned away and her own lawyer escorted her to the door, opening it.

‘Max Hart won’t marry you,’ Tony threw after her. ‘He won’t give you children. You’ll end up on the scrap heap with the rest of the women he’s had.’

She knew Max would move on as he always did and she knew it would hurt when he did. But he had been there for her at a critical time in her life, giving her what she needed, helping her to find the strength to become a person who could stand on her own feet and make her own choices. She fiercely resolved to remember the good he’d done after he moved on. It had to outweigh the hurt she would inevitably feel.

Her lawyer stepped back to usher her out of the boardroom. Chloe walked forward into the legal secretary’s office.

‘I’d give you a better life than Max Hart ever will,’ Tony persisted in a last, heart-clawing plea. ‘I swear you’re the only woman for me. I’ll never again even look at anyone else. And we’ll have a family. As many children as you want. What we had was good before Laura mucked it up. Think about it, Chloe. Think about it. Call me…’

The door was closed behind her.

Gerry Anderson rose from his chair in the secretary’s office.

Chloe thanked her lawyer.

She could leave now and she did.

Max checked his watch again, frowning over the time that had passed since Chloe’s eleven o’clock meeting with the lawyers and Tony Lipton.

‘What’s got you so uptight, Max?’ Angus Hilliard inquired, his bespectacled grey eyes glinting with sharp curiosity. ‘That’s the third time you’ve checked the time and frowned, apart from the fact you haven’t been giving our business your undivided attention.’

Max grimaced at the head of his legal department who was too astute a man to let anything go unnoticed. ‘Waiting on a call from Chloe. A bit of nasty stuff going on with Tony Lipton and Laura Farrell.’

‘Ah! The pregnant P.A. making more waves? Anything I can do?’

‘No. The divorce lawyers are handling it, Angus. What’s worrying me is the meeting shouldn’t have dragged on this long. I wanted to accompany Chloe to it…’

‘Better you didn’t, Max.’