Stranded For One Scandalous Week (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rebels, Brothers, Billionaires Book 1) by Natalie Anderson (best e books to read TXT) 📗

enough to ensure his partner was there with him. But Merle had been. In fact, she’d been a step ahead. He’d heard it in her breathing, seen it in her glazed eyes, felt it in every inch of her body. She’d stayed a step ahead of him the rest of the night too. She was still a step ahead of him now. He followed her into the helicopter. He didn’t speak. The bright sunlight made his eyes ache.

Last Friday he’d arrived on Waiheke at night and the house had been cloaked in dusky darkness. For the first day he’d focused on the pool. Then he’d been so focused on Merle he’d not noticed the property—he’d avoided it. But this time, the midday sun was bright and he was so focused on not looking at Merle that he couldn’t help but see it. All of it. A wall of hurt and regret slammed into him. The helicopter lifted up as soon as they were clear and walking towards that wretched lawn court. In only a few minutes silence returned. He glanced to see Merle watching him. Beyond her, the house loomed. He couldn’t decide which caused him the most discomfort.

‘This is the last time I’ll be here,’ he muttered unthinkingly. He had to be done with it.

‘This week.’ She nodded.

‘At all,’ he corrected flatly.

She paused on the path. ‘You’re not coming back?’ Her soft lips parted on an audible breath. ‘Are you planning to sell it?’

Her shock lifted his heart for a second—before it smashed back down like a stone hitting concrete.

‘Why does that surprise you?’ he asked. Surely she understood this place held little happiness for him?

‘You love it here.’

‘No.’ His blood ran cold here. ‘I wasn’t going to come back at all. But in the end I couldn’t let it go without...’

He growled, because he’d never expressed it aloud—never wanted to. But he was tired and somehow he couldn’t resist the compulsion to tell her. As if she were justice herself—a scale with which he could weigh the decision—even though he already knew it tipped him towards guilty.

‘I had to see what he’d done to wreck the place,’ he muttered in frustration.

‘You think this is wrecked?’ Merle’s gaze shot back to the house briefly before returning to shine that steadfast belief into his. ‘Ash, this place is beautiful—’

‘You’re wrong. It was beautiful.’

She didn’t understand the level—or the layers—of destruction. She didn’t know that the last time he’d visited was branded in his brain and had left a wound that would never heal. He’d regret the pain he’d caused for the rest of his life. There could be no redemption. His mistakes were unforgivable.

‘The heart of it got ripped out, and a new facade put in place,’ he said gruffly. ‘It looks like perfection but there’s nothing real.’

His skin tightened but the misery swelling within couldn’t be contained. He stood even more rigidly, resisting the threatening emotional explosion. He didn’t want this. He couldn’t even walk inside. Instead he gazed around the garden.

‘Ash?’

‘There used to be an orchard where the tennis court is,’ he muttered. ‘Apples, peaches, plums... I used to climb up and pick something and take it to where Mum was watching from the balcony. She always knew where the best ones were but she let me find them.’

He was too lost in memory to register the long pause.

‘That would’ve been awesome,’ Merle eventually responded with her softness.

‘They ripped it out when they put in the bunker and the tennis court.’ He stared at the green expanse that had shocked him so completely. ‘The garden was everything to her. She couldn’t do the physical work but she designed it. She was good friends with the groundsman and they kept a record of the produce each year.’ He surveyed it, remembering how much there’d once been. ‘I guess nothing of any real depth can grow when there’s a lump of cold metal just beneath the surface.’

Which was him too, right? Fine superficially, but beneath—what was there really? For the first time he felt how lacking in depth, how empty inside he was. A sense of futility stunned him—for all of his success, his years proving to his father that he didn’t need him, that he could do better than him. What, exactly, had it all been for? His father had foisted the inheritance on him anyway. Ignoring Ash’s years of anger and absence. He’d still assumed that Ash was his true son—just like him, the worthy recipient of what he’d created.

‘I haven’t been back here in almost a decade,’ he admitted quietly.

Friday night had been the first time he’d seen that the trees had been replaced with perfect lawn, that the comfortable old house had been renovated into soullessness with stripped-back decor and nothing intimate or personal about the place. He knew it was maintained by a team of strangers who swooped in and set everything ‘just so’. Even now, a year after his father’s death, they maintained its flawless facade. It irritated him intensely. Even after his death his father was all about false appearances. About destroying what should have been wonderful—purely because of greed. Everything had been an investment, but Hugh didn’t value true treasure. Like those damned trees.

‘Why haven’t you been in so long?’

He’d simply been unable to. But it had come to a point when he couldn’t avoid it any longer.

‘After Mum died, I fell out with my father. I refused to have anything to do with him or the company, I avoided all our properties and built my own,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve finally come back and discovered my worst nightmare was reality. He’s scrubbed everything of her from the place. He’s destroyed everything she’d created to fulfil some stupid desire for some gadget he thought was essential.’

‘You came here a lot before she died?’

‘When Mum’s health declined, she moved here permanently.’

Merle stood very still beside him. ‘But your dad was still in Sydney?’

He nodded. He could hear the confusion in her voice. He’d