Surrender to the Past

‘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.

‘We had nothing left to say to each other, Ethan. You were just using me. Just—’ Mia broke off abruptly as she heard her the emotional break in her voice.

She would not do this! She didn’t care what Ethan thought of her now, what he accused her of—or how hurtful she found those accusations—she would not allow herself to be put through this emotional wringer a second time.

The worst part of it was that she had loved her father so much—worshipped him, almost. She had liked Grace Black too, for the two years she’d been a pupil at her school. Until she’d later found out about the affair.

As for her feelings for Ethan …!

She had worshipped him from afar for years too—already been crazily in love with him when he’d asked her out for the first time. She would have done anything—been anything that he wanted her to be. And all the time—all the time his mother had been involved in a relationship with Mia’s father.

She dropped down abruptly onto the bench, her face averted. ‘You’re right, Ethan. We’re done here.’

Ethan looked at the sharpness of her profile: pale and hollow cheeks, haunted eyes, the slenderness of her body poised as if for a fight.

He knew how much the past had hurt Mia. How much his own connection with the woman her father loved had and still did hurt her. But she would not believe—how could she, when she refused to believe everything else he told her?—how hurt and upset he had been about that friendship too, until William and his mother had explained the truth of the situation to him.

A truth that William had refused absolutely ever to confide in the grieving Mia, insisting that he had no intention of trying to win back his daughter’s love at the cost of damaging Mia’s memory of the mother she had loved.

Ethan thrust his clenched hands into the pockets of his overcoat. ‘I take it you still know where the offices of Burton Industries are? If you should change your mind and decide you want to talk to me after all?’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t even glance at him.

‘But you aren’t going to, are you …?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘No.’

Ethan clearly remembered the first time he had seen Mia. He had been twenty-two, about to start his PhD at LSE, and Mia had been sixteen years old—a new sixth-form pupil at the school where his mother was headmistress. Her father had decided that it would be better for Mia to attend a boarding school after her mother had been involved in a car accident the year before, resulting in Kay being in a wheelchair, with her face badly scarred, and quite unable to deal with the needs of her young daughter.

It had been Mia’s first time away from home, and she had obviously been very nervous at having tea, along with all the other new girls, at the home of her new headmistress.

She had stood silent and alone at the back of his mother’s private sitting room, nothing at all like those other self-confident sixteen-year-old girls vying for the attention of the headmistress’s son. Instead she had exuded all the vulnerability of a puppy taken too early from its mother: her eyes too big for her face, the corn-gold hair long and silky, a vulnerable curve to the delicacy of her chin.

Ethan had felt sorry for her—had realized that she couldn’t know any of the other new girls yet. Her sweet shyness had revealed how traumatised she was at leaving her parents and her home for the first time, and it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for Ethan to go and talk to her, to ease some of her nervousness, and for a friendship of sorts to develop between the two of them after that initial meeting.

An intermittent friendship, admittedly, with Ethan away at university most of the time, but he had always made a point of seeing and speaking with Mia at least once when he came home for the weekend or holidays.

It had seemed entirely natural too that Ethan should take the job offered to him with her father’s company when he finally left university, and it hadn’t been that big a step when he’d seen Mia again, looking stunningly beautiful and completely grown up in a figure-hugging red gown as she acted as her father’s hostess at the company Christmas party, for him to realise he was deeply attracted to this more mature Mia.

It had been an attraction she had seemed to more than reciprocate when she’d accepted his invitation to dinner, and the two of them had begun to see each other on a regular basis.

Ethan had dated often during his university years, and gone to bed with quite a few of those women, but his relationship with Mia hadn’t been like anything he had known in the past: emotionally intense, and physically satisfying in a way Ethan had never experienced with anyone else. Then or since …

The woman now sitting on the park bench wasn’t the Mia he had known. This woman wasn’t in the least shy, and as for that appealing sweetness that had once brought out such a protective instinct in him—this older, assertive Mia was more like a Rottweiler than a defenceless puppy! So much so that Ethan certainly wouldn’t have attempted to even take her in his arms, let alone make love with her.

Her expression was scornful now as she looked at him. ‘Goodbye, Ethan.’

He sighed heavily. ‘No matter what you may choose to believe to the contrary, Mia, my liking for you never had anything to do with my mother or my job at Burton Industries.’

Mia only heard the first part of that statement—Ethan had ‘liked’ her! When Mia’s naive and trusting heart had hoped that he would fall in love with her, as she had fallen in with him …

‘How fortunate for you that you got over the emotion so quickly!’

Ethan gave a shake of his head. ‘I don’t know enough about who or what you are any more to know how I feel towards you now,’ he acknowledged heavily. ‘The Mia I once knew was sweet and warm, utterly enchanting, and I don’t believe she would ever have deliberately hurt anyone, either.’

Her cheeks became flushed at the rebuke she heard in his tone. ‘I had to grow up some time, Ethan.’

‘So you did,’ he accepted huskily.

And he obviously didn’t like the way in which she had grown up! Well, that was just too bad—because Mia much preferred herself this way. Tougher. Stronger.

Ethan took a large brown envelope out of his pocket. ‘You might like to have this.’

‘What is it?’ Mia said stiffly, totally ignoring the envelope he held out to her.

‘Why don’t you take a look inside and see?’ He laid the envelope down on the bench beside her before turning and walking away.

Which was when the tears began to fall hotly, scaldingly down Mia’s cheeks.

Damn!

Crying was the last thing Mia wanted to do. Instead she wanted to scream and shout, to wail against whatever cruel fate had brought Ethan back into her life.