Page 31 of How To Tempt The Off-Limits Billionaire

She knew that intellectually, but she needed to believe it, heart, body and soul. She just needed a little more time to pull herself together. She dragged her eyes off his handsome face and played with the frayed edges of her denim shorts. “I’m sorry I told Susan that we were having an affair, but I didn’t know what else to tell her. She’s pretty persistent.”

Irritation flashed across his face. “Persistentis a nice word for her,” he muttered, his tone bitter.

Wow, there most definitely was no love lost between them. Ro placed her elbows on the inside of her knees and rested her chin against her linked hands, ready to listen. “As you know, she’s Mimi’s daughter and she’s on the board of Clos du Cadieux,” he began.

“Mmm...”

Ro cocked her head to the side, lifting her eyebrows to get him to explain. Muzi’s eyes connected with hers and slid away. His eyebrows pulled together in a deep frown and he looked away from her to the TV, and did she imagine him moving his leg so that it no longer touched hers? Oh, she didn’t need to be a psychologist to tell that Susan was not someone he wanted to discuss.

A long silence stretched between them, a little uncomfortable, a lot awkward. Ro sighed, wishing he found it as easy to talk to her as she did him. With her, he just needed to look at her with those deep, intense eyes and she started to gush.

It was obvious she did not have the same effect on him.

Ro started to stand up but he gripped her knee as if he were trying to keep her in place. “It’s complicated,” he said, his normally smooth voice rough with emotion.

“It always is,” Ro softly murmured.

“Susan doesn’t like me,” he stated. Ro covered his hand with hers, linking their fingers. Muzi looked down at their interwoven digits and she felt him shudder. “I should qualify that, she’s never liked me.Ever.”

Ro frowned, trying to make sense of his statement. Looking for clarification, she tossed out another question. “You grew up with her, didn’t you?”

“I told you that my grandmother worked for Mimi and I came to live with Lu when I was three. I have no memories of my life before that, few memories of my mother. I do not have the first clue who my father is,” Muzi said, his voice flat and monotonous. He sounded like he was reading from a cereal box and Ro realized that this was his way to deal with a painful subject.

If he had to explain, he’d do it but with as little fuss as possible.

“Lu was awesome and so was Mimi. Years after I came to live with Lu, Susan divorced her husband and she moved back into Mimi’s mansion with her two sons. Mimi treated us all the same—I wasn’t treated like her servant’s son, she wouldn’t countenance that. Rafe, Keane and I became like brothers.”

“And Susan?” Ro asked, knowing that he’d left out a huge chunk of this story.

He stared at a point past her shoulder, and pain and anguish danced across his face and into his eyes. “She was the original Jekyll and Hyde.”

“What do you mean?” Ro asked, puzzled.

His face, just for a second, revealed long-ago devastation before it settled back into his “Nothing to see here” expression. “Because of our age difference, Susan treated me like another of her sons when we had company. When we were amongst friends, or even when it was just the family, she was supersweet. But...”

She tightened the grip on his fingers, suspecting that she knew what was coming.

“But when she got me alone, she turned into a viper—a cold, angry, vicious woman.”

Ah, no. Please, no.

“She told me, often, that she would do everything in her power to see that I left Mimi’s house, that I was sent back to my mother’s family in the Transkei, people I never met. She told me that I wasn’t good enough to live at La Fontaine, which is Mimi’s estate, just a few miles east of here. It’s where I grew up, where Mimi still lives.”

Ro felt her other hand tightening into a fist as a wave of anger bubbled up inside her. Educating kids, protecting kids was what she did, who she was, and the thought of an innocent Muzi at the mercy of a vicious adult made her want to scream.

But she knew if she reacted with anything but an empathetic expression, if she showed Muzi her anger or her sympathy, he’d take her response as pity and he’d shut down and shut her out.

“She told me that if I said anything, that if I ratted on her, they wouldn’t believe me and I’d be sent away. That I would go back to poverty, that I would never be educated, that I would be alone.”

Red-hot anger burned the back of her throat. Not able to say anything without revealing her anger, she gestured for Muzi to continue.

“Lu died when I was ten, Mimi adopted me and threw me an official welcome-to-the-family party. Susan hugged me, said everything she should but later on she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she would do everything in her power to ostracize me, to separate me from Mimi. Later, I realized that her intention, probably all along but definitely from the time my adoption became legal, was to separate me from Mimi’s money. Mimi’s enormous estate is to be split four ways, with Susan, Rafe, Keane and me as her heirs.”

“And Susan doesn’t like that,” Ro said, proud that her voice sounded reasonably normal.

“Susan hates that. Always has, always will.”

“There’s more to this story, Muzi. Tell me.”

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