Page 43 of So That Happened
He frowned. ‘A glitch?’
‘Yes.’
He was silent for a while.
‘Abi’s been such a good friend to me. I can’t believe I shagged you when you won’t even speak to her,’ she said to cover the awkwardness, aiming for conviviality but failing miserably.
Connor’s voice was hard. ‘Who you sleep with has nothing to do with her.’
‘But it seems so… disrespectful.’
He grinned at her now and her stomach dropped to the ground.
‘You’re so prim.’ He held up a hand. ‘But don’t get me wrong. I find it a huge turn-on.’
He really needed to stop flirting with her if he wasn’t up for more shenanigans. Perhaps a question more close to the bone would remind him of that.
‘Are you ever going to tell me why you won’t see your own sister?’
He turned to study her for a second. ‘You’re not going to drop this, are you?’
‘No.’
He continued to look at her, his eyes searching for something in hers – a trap, perhaps? She’d never met anyone so guarded.
‘What the hell.’ He shrugged. ‘Makes no difference to me anyway.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘You know about my parents?’
‘Sure – they used to own the Magnetica Corporation.’
‘Right. It used to be a thriving company when my grandfather ran it. They made cassette tapes, then video tapes, right up until the early nineties when they were all the rage. Then they moved into selling 35mm film for movie cameras.’
‘Yeah, I remember seeing something about it on a documentary recently.’
Connor let out a low, hard laugh and dug his feet into the soft sand. ‘Yeah, well… One of the reasons it was successful for so long was because both of my parents worked there all the time. And I mean all the time.’
He paused, but Josie didn’t want to butt in. She let the silence hang, sliding her fingers through the sand for something to do.
‘So Abigail and I spent most of our time with an ever-changing succession of nannies and au pairs. We were purely fashion accessories to our parents. We barely saw them, or each other; they sent us to separate schools. The only person who had any time for us was our grandmother. We spent our holidays with her. She left us the farmhouse in her will when she died. I was eighteen and Abigail was sixteen when we lost her. She didn’t agree with the way our parents had brought us up – she believed children needed their mother and father. It caused a huge rift between them. They were practically estranged by the time she died.’
Josie nodded, eager for him to continue. This went partway to explaining why he was such an independent character and why he’d been so hard on her when they’d first talked about her career.
‘Magnetica had started to lose money a little while before our grandmother died. The digital revolution was well under way and the stuff my parents manufactured was becoming obsolete. They’d planned poorly for the future and found themselves with money trouble. We, apparently, were their way out of debt. My grandmother was a rich woman; she just didn’t flaunt it like my parents did. She left most of her money to me and the remainder to Abigail, but left our parents nothing. I think they were banking on the inheritance to get their business out of trouble. So they put pressure on us to invest in their company so they could segue into digital cameras. Nobody else would touch them with a bargepole. They wanted control of the money. We were in the way.’
‘But you didn’t agree to it?’
‘I refused to help. My grandma had made Abigail and me promise not to give them a penny. It was really important to her they didn’t get their hands on it. I already had plans for the money. I wanted to do some good with it. There were people starving in the world – dying from drinking filthy water, for God’s sake. Personal entertainment didn’t rank highly on my list of priorities.’
‘So what happened?’
He dug his feet deeper into the sand. ‘Abigail buckled under the pressure and agreed to use her share to help my parents out. She backed them up when they put pressure on me to do the same. Basically, it was made clear that if I didn’t help them out financially, I wouldn’t be welcome in the family any more.’
Josie stared at him, aghast. ‘That doesn’t sound like the Abigail I know.’
Connor looked at her steadily. ‘You think I’m lying?’
The tone of his voice was so scornful she felt a flash of alarm.
‘Of course not,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I just can’t reconcile it with the woman I know, that’s all.’
