Sarah M. Anderson - One Night With The Billionaire

‘He’ll be rolling in his grave right now,’ he said, smiling down at her. He loved this old lady and, no matter what, these two weeks were a gift. ‘The whole Bond dynasty will be. My father, my grandfather and his grandfather before them. What do you reckon, Margot—should I give up banking and run away with the circus?’

‘There’s not a lot of money in circusing,’ Allie said, smiling but rueful. ‘Plus you’ll have to look for another circus.’

‘I don’t know why this one’s closing.’ Margot suddenly sounded fretful. ‘Mathew, you should buy it. You’re rich enough to buy it. He is, you know,’ she said to Allie, as if Matt was suddenly not there. ‘Rich as Croesus. He’s rolling in banking money like his father and his grandfather and great-grandfather before him. Not that it’s made any of them happy. Mathew, buy a circus and have some fun.’

Allie’s smile remained but it started to look fixed.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said softly. ‘Thank you for offering,’ she told Margot, with only a sideways glance at Matt. ‘But, even though this has been an appalling shock and we’re not as prepared as I thought we were, this is a circus on its last legs. Look round, Margot. Half our crew is geriatric.’

‘They don’t look geriatric to me,’ Margot snapped.

‘You’re how old?’ Allie said and her smile returned. ‘Get real, Margot. Could you manage a trapeze or two? There’s a time to move on.’

‘Exactly,’ Margot said and glared at her nephew. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling Mathew.’

‘I don’t mean dying,’ Allie said indignantly. ‘Just … not playing with the circus any more. Taking life seriously.’

‘Why don’t you mean dying then?’ Margot said morosely. ‘You can’t get any more serious than that.’

‘Margot …’

‘Don’t you worry about me, girl,’ Margot ordered with a decisive nod. ‘Tell me, are you making plans to see these elephants of yours? Mathew tells me you didn’t even know where they were.’

‘I can’t worry about them now. I’ll figure …’

‘You loved them,’ Margot snapped. ‘That’s why your grandfather asked for my help in the first place. I know he told you he’d sold them to a zoo in Western Australia. I always thought it was stupid, lying to you, but now you know they’re local, you could go see them. Mathew could take you.’

And the mischief was back, just like that.

‘Where are they?’ Allie said cautiously.

‘It’s an open range sanctuary, part of a farm, only it’s not open to the public. You’ll need to get more details from Henry but, as far as I can remember, it’s on the other side of Wagga.’

‘Wagga,’ Allie said faintly. ‘That’s almost three hundred miles.’

‘Matt has a nice car.’ Margot sounded oblivious to a minor hiccup like three hundred miles. ‘The circus doesn’t do a matinee on Wednesday. You could be there and back by the evening show.’

‘Not even for my elephants,’ Allie said, and Matt realised there’d been a faint sheen of hope in her eyes, a lifting of the bleak acceptance he’d seen too much of, but she extinguished the hope fast now and moved on. ‘Three hundred miles and back in a day with a show afterwards? That’s impossible. When … when we’re wound up, there’ll be all the time in the world to go look at elephants.’

‘But you’d like to,’ Matt said slowly, watching her face.

‘You have a gorgeous car,’ she told him. ‘But not that gorgeous. A six hundred mile round trip? Get real. Did you like the show, Margot?’

‘I loved it,’ Margot said soundly.

‘Well, that’s all that matters,’ Allie decreed. ‘Keeping the punters happy. For the next two weeks this circus is going to run like clockwork, and then I’ll worry about my elephants. I’ll have time then.’

‘In between finding houses, settling geriatric circus staff, finding a job …’ Matt growled, but she shook her head. She looked fabulous, he thought, in her gorgeous pink and silver body-suit. She looked trim, taut and so sexy she took a man’s breath away. She also looked desolate. But, desolate or not, she also looked strong. She was cutting him out of this equation.

‘That’s not your problem,’ she told him. ‘Margot, your nephew very kindly gave me time out today—he fed me fish and chips and he gave me time for a snooze. So he’s being our ringmaster and he’s being kind, but apart from that … I need to cope with this on my own.’

She’d been kneeling beside Margot. Now she rose. Matt held out his hand to help her but she ignored it.

‘I do need to do this on my own,’ she said, gently but implacably. ‘And I will. Thank you for your help, Mathew, and thank you for your friendship, Margot, but I need to go help pack up now. Mathew, you need to take your aunt home.’

Mathew.

My name is Matt, Matt thought, but he didn’t say it. Allie was resetting boundaries, and what right did he have to step over them?

‘She really wants to see those elephants.’

Settled into his car, Margot was quietly thoughtful. They were halfway home before she finally came out with what was bothering her.

‘I know she does,’ Matt said. ‘But a six hundred mile round trip in a day is ridiculous.’

‘Since when did a little matter of six hundred miles ever get in the way of a Bond?’ Margot snapped, and he glanced at her and thought she looked exhausted.

How much had tonight taken out of her?

She’d turned away and was looking out of the window, over the bay to the twinkling lights of the boats at swing moorings.

‘You know, it doesn’t happen all that often,’ she said softly into the night, and he had a feeling she was half talking to herself.

‘What doesn’t happen?’

She was silent for a moment. A long moment. Then …

‘I fell in love,’ she said at last, into the silence. ‘You’ve seen his photograph on my mantel. Raymond. He was a lovely, laughing fisherman. He was … wonderful. But my parents disapproved—oh, how they disapproved. A Bond, marrying a fisherman. We’d come down here for a family holiday and the thought that I could meet and fall in love with someone who was so out of our world … It was insupportable—and I was insistent but not insistent enough.’

‘You told him you’d marry him.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly bleak. She stared down at her gnarled old hand, to the modest diamond ring that had been there for as long as Matt could remember. ‘We met just as the war started. I met him on the esplanade. The heel had come off my shoe and he helped me home. We went to two dances and two showings of the same picture. Then Father got wind of it and I was whisked back to Sydney. Soon afterwards, Raymond was called up and sent abroad. We wrote, though. I still have his letters. Lovely, lovely letters. Then, two years later, he came home—for a whole three weeks. He’d been wounded—he was home on leave before being sent abroad again. He came to Sydney to find me and he gave me this ring.’

She stared down at the ring and it was as if she was looking into the very centre of the diamond. Seeing what was inside. Seeing what was in her heart all those years ago.

‘He wanted to marry me before he went back,’ she whispered. ‘And I wanted to. But my father … your great-grandfather …’ She shook her head. ‘He was so angry. He asked how I could know after such a short time? He said if we really loved each other it’d stand separation. He said … I forbid it. And I was stupid enough, dumb enough, weak enough to agree. So I kissed my Raymond goodbye and he died six months later.’

She stared down at the tiny diamond and she shook her head, her grief still raw and obvious after how many years? And then she glared straight at Matt.