Page 64 of Sweet Temptation

He took a sip of his drink before he continued. “I hear you’re doing well in all of your classes.”

I guessed that meant he’d been checking up on me again. “Yeah, I’m doing okay. I like schoolwork and kind of throw myself into it.” Especially when I was trying not to think about a certain boy who’d broken up with me. Not that I was going to admit that to Matthew.

“I was the same at your age,” he admitted. “I always had my nose in a book.”

“Really?”

He nodded. It wasn’t surprising given what a successful businessman he seemed to be. But it felt nice to know we shared that in common.

“Mom never really understood it,” I said. “She’s always been better at hands-on learning rather than book learning.”

Matthew chuckled. “Candice was the same back when we dated. You could show her how to do something once, and she’d be a master in minutes, but there was no way you could get her to learn it out of a book.”

It was strange hearing Matthew talk about my mom. My whole life, I’d never heard details of their relationship. I had only ever focused on the fact he’d left and wasn’t around. “Mom never really told me much about the two of you dating.”

The lightness in Matthew’s eyes dimmed somewhat at my words. “I don’t blame her. She must have hated me, thinking I’d abandoned the both of you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it was that. I get the feeling she never talked about you because she found it too hard.”

“I find it hard to talk about too. It took me a long time to get over your mother,” he murmured. “To this day, I haven’t met someone as special as her. I can’t tell you how many sleepless nights I’ve experienced since finding out I could have had the both of you in my life all this time.”

I slowly stirred my spoon around the bowl as I summoned the courage to ask my next question. With a deep breath, I blurted it out. “What would you have done if you’d got my mom’s letter about me?”

My stomach twisted with nerves, and I couldn’t look him in the eyes as I waited for his reply. Matthew reached across the table and took my hand in his. Slowly, I peered up at him.

“I would have done whatever it took to keep you both in my life,” he said. “I had a difficult relationship with my father, but I will never forgive him for not telling me about you. I regret that we’ve missed the last seventeen years together more than anything.”

Matthew really wanted me in his life. He truly wanted me. And I could see it now so clearly in his eyes. I gave him a smile as he squeezed my hand. When he released it, he coughed and glanced away, like he was struggling to keep his feelings at bay too. He turned his attention to his food, and I took this as my cue to eat something myself. It was hard sharing emotions with someone when you were still only on the precipice of getting to know one another.

The soup Matthew’s chef had prepared was amazing, but I barely seemed to taste it anymore. It was hard to focus on eating when your long-lost father had just told you how much he wanted you in his life.

“I suppose you would like to hear about what happened with the Hastings family,” Matthew said.

My eyes lifted in one swift movement to meet his. After everything Matthew had just admitted, I didn’t want to put a dampener on our dinner by turning the conversation to a topic that seemed so fraught with pain and anger. I also didn’t want to hear what he had to say if it was going to support Noah’s claim that Matthew was a bad person. The thought made me a little queasy. It felt like we were finally bonding, and I didn’t want to ruin that.

I wasn’t sure when I’d have another opportunity to talk with him about this though. And if my father truly had a malicious side, it was better I know that now. I had Noah’s side of the story, but I needed my father’s too. It was time I had the whole truth.

I slowly nodded. “I just feel like I’m stuck in the middle of something I don’t fully understand. You seem to hate them just as much as they hate you. And me... They hate me too just by association.”

“I’m sorry you’ve been made to feel that way. I’ll do my best to explain,” Matthew started. “There’s a history with our families, and it’s not very pleasant.”

He drew in a breath as if bracing himself for the story he had to tell. “Back when your grandfather and Noah’s grandfather were young and just starting out in their careers, they worked together,” he said. “James LaFleur and William Hastings were both brilliant and determined scientists, but they also shared a stubborn competitive streak and an inability to compromise or forgive.

“They fell out after a fire started in their lab and destroyed years of hard work,” he continued. “To this day, no one could tell you for sure what caused the fire, but they both blamed each other and went their separate ways. That might have been the end of the feud, but William Hastings lodged a patent on the cancer treatment they’d been working on together. A treatment my father believed had been lost in the fire.”

“Wait, so you’re saying that William stole my grandfather’s work?” I asked.

“It was both of their work, but yes,” Matthew said. “It only confirmed to my father that William had started the fire to cut him out. It commenced years of backlash and fighting. They were constantly competing or attempting to sabotage one another. My father was in and out of court for almost a decade trying to prove he had a right to his own work.”

I swallowed as I considered what Matthew had said. His account of what started the whole feud was far more detailed than Noah’s had been. This was the first I’d heard about a fire destroying their work, and that was certainly a more reasonable explanation for my grandfather’s hatred than mere jealousy. If William really had started the fire and stolen my grandfather’s work, then maybe the LaFleurs’ vendetta against the Hastings was justified.

“This isn’t just about your father though, is it?”

“No.” Matthew let out a sigh. “I’ve had my own hand in the battle between our families. All my life, I saw my father being torn apart because he couldn’t manufacture the treatment he worked so hard to create. And he had to watch as William Hastings grew rich off the back of it. I often wondered if my father would have been a different man, a softer man, if he hadn’t been so brutally betrayed.”

Matthew seemed to get lost in his thoughts for a moment but then shook his head and continued. “Anyway, a couple of years back, the patent ended on the treatment they’d fought over. So, I started to manufacture a generic version of it. William had been charging extortionate fees for the drug for years, and the price on it was so high that most people couldn’t afford it.

“I hated knowing that people who needed my father’s treatment couldn’t access it, so I decided to sell it as cheaply as possible. I don’t make any profit on the drug. Actually, I think we might run at a loss. But, our company is diversified enough that it is not an issue. If one good thing came out of William’s betrayal, it was that my father was always striving to be ahead of the game and constantly innovating and developing our products.”

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