The Passion

Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

FELISHA

“ H e’s arriving back in the country tonight. I’ve been watching the movements of his security team, and the plane is on standby in Switzerland, ready to leave to bring him home.”

Harper and I are sitting at the desk in the corner of my office that we often use when we are working on things together. I find we achieve so much when we are brainstorming, which works better when we are side by side at a desk. We don’t ever use the boardroom, as we just want it to be the two of us without any interruptions. Plus, I like the composure of my office. The room is exactly how I want it. The couches that to the side are cream embossed material, and the furniture is a subtle light-colored wood. There is the softness in the room, with real plants and a splash of color in an abstract painting of flowers. All brightly colored and bringing life into the room.

My office is a contrast to the rest of the Kentwall Estates office. Of course it shows my father’s personality. Everything is dark heavy wood, old-fashioned furniture. Traditional landscapes on the wall and long thick velvet curtains that block much of the natural light. It doesn’t go with the modern building we are housed in at all, but what my father wanted, my father got. At that stage I didn’t care as long as I could decorate my office myself. He agreed begrudgingly and complains all the time when he walks in here how it doesn’t match with the rest of the office.

And you can guarantee the moment I march him out of this office, I will have the decorators in here letting the light in, brightening the rooms up with furniture and art, and then I’ll sit back and watch how the staff feel better walking in every morning.

“When I got out of bed this morning, I wasn’t thinking about confronting him today, but I don’t want to put this off. As soon as he has landed and the car is heading back here, I will head upstairs to his apartment and be waiting for him.” I know last Sunday I was dreading he would do the same to me and how anxious I felt about it, but I don’t care. He doesn’t deserve my respect anymore.

“I doubt you are thinking about anything when you are in bed in the mornings now. Well, at least I hope that’s the case, otherwise what’s the point of going home with that sexy man?” Harper wiggles her eyebrows at me.

“Let’s not start that discussion here. I have a hard enough time keeping Flynn out of my mind while I’m at work. I was always so good at segregating my thoughts, but he has a habit of jumping any lines I draw in my head. I shouldn’t be surprised really, because he does that in real life too.” Both of us giggle but only for a short moment.

“What has this man done to you?” She is smiling, knowing full well that I’m in love with him because I can’t hide anything from her.

“It’s not so much him, but that I’ve never loved anyone before, so keeping my private and work life separate was easy. Now, not so much. And I can’t say I would change it.” I lean back in my chair as I acknowledge the change in not only my life but in me.

“Oh, you are so cute it’s almost sickening.” Harper throws her pen at me, and that’s enough to snap me out of it.

“You’re just jealous.” Grinning, I sit back up in my chair.

“Not a chance in this world and you know that. Well… I mean, the sex with the hot guy every night would be great, but all the other crap that is attached to a relationship, no thanks.” She grabs her pen back up off the floor where it landed after she threw it at me, and then she gets a glint in her eye. “Although, that brother of his might be worth a go.”

“Oh my God, stop it. Forrest is on your banned list.” I can’t even imagine them together, not that I know him that well yet, and I don’t even know if he likes me, but he and Harper are like polar opposites. He is dark and broody, where Harper is loud, bubbly, and so confident in what she wants out of life.

“You are so mean. Just one night is all I’m asking for.” She rolls her eyes at me and sits back comfortably in her chair. “Anyway, moving on to more important things. Let’s talk about how you are going to tell that old coot tonight that he is an absolute twat, and he has no control over your life.”

I wish it was that easy.

Standing in my father’s apartment waiting for him to arrive in the elevator from downstairs has my anxiety peaking.

I haven’t felt great all day since I heard that he was returning tonight, and then the phone call with Flynn where he was clearly upset with me but just wouldn’t come right out and say it hasn’t helped. I was going to tell him, but I just wanted to do it in person. I made my decision as I was driving into the office this morning, making the call to Cherie early from the car. I don’t know why but this woman gets me. Maybe it’s the shared experiences, even though they have come from different paths. I just didn’t expect Forrest to find out so soon and run straight to Flynn.

Cherie told me she had already made some inquires and joined into one of the poker games this week, so she wouldn’t be a new player the night my father joined. When I asked why she started the plan when I hadn’t even spoken to her, she told me she knew I would say yes. I’m glad she was that confident because I had no idea what I was going to do until this morning. I insisted I would give her the money to bet with, but she said she doesn’t want any contact with me now until this is over. She wanted me to tell her what I hoped to get out of this plan and then to trust her to pull it off. Stupidly, I practically word vomited to her all that I was hoping would happen, and then we ended the call.

If anyone wanted to find a connection between us, they could do it without too much hassle, when she is heading up the charity that Rem and Elouise have started and is friends with the whole Darby Hotel management team. As soon as it starts to filter through to the media that Flynn and I are together, the pieces will all come together. Hopefully it will all be over before that happens. Otherwise, I’ll just be complicating matters with my decision.

It seems I keep making more than a few poor judgments lately, and it concerns me that this may be another one, but it’s something I need to do.

The soft chime of the elevator arriving in the apartment sends my body into fight-or-flight mode. I feel myself starting to sweat, my mouth is dry, and the thumping in my chest from my racing heart feels like it’s about to crack my ribs and jump out.

I know my father won’t be alone, one of his men will be carrying his bags straight to his room. It would beneath him to do it himself.

Using all the strength I have, I pull my shoulders back and put on the sweet-daughter face so I’m ready to greet him as the doors open.

“Felisha, what are you doing here?” His gruff voice echoes through the foyer as I stand ready.

“Father, lovely to see you safe back from Switzerland. Thank you, Frank.” I nod to his bodyguard who then leaves us and walks to my father’s room with his bags. I’m grinding my teeth with the absolute lie that just came out of my mouth.

“Hmmph,” he grunts as he storms past me straight into his office. Which he doesn’t realize suits me just fine. I don’t want the house staff to hear what we are talking about, and although they all sign NDAs to work for him, you’d be surprised what leaks out from “ unknown” sources.

“We need to talk,” I start, following him into the office and closing the door behind me.

“Not interested, any talking will be in Saturday’s meeting.” His reply has no feeling in it.

“I don’t care, you will listen anyway, because I’m not leaving here until I say everything that I came here to say.” I stand in front of his desk while he takes a seat and presumes the body language of arrogance, to remind me that he is my father, the boss, and the lord of the house, literally.

“I think you said enough on our last phone call, Felisha. It is quite clear now that you will no longer do as I wish, and that has all come about after you have met this man that you profess to love.” I hate when there is no change in the tone of his voice because I can’t read him. Over the years I have learned to read people well. It’s a skill you need in business meetings when you are in the process of negotiating deals. But it now makes a lot of sense that reading my father’s face and body language has always been hard for me, but it must be a trained skill of his to have the perfect poker face. Gets him through his gambling so at least some of the time he wins.

Well, he isn’t winning this time. I’ve had enough of being pushed around by him in the last few months.

“Did you ever love my mother?” The question catches him off guard.

“What?”

“Did. You. Ever. Love. My mother?” I spell out the question like he is a child.

“Why does that matter?” His eyes now show that I have poked the bear, and all I can think is, good. Now, where is the bigger stick so I can poke harder.

“Well, I think in your silence, there’s my answer. For two reasons. The first, you wouldn’t have hesitated to answer my question if you did. The second is you wouldn’t ever question my love for Flynn if you knew what it was like to be with someone you know you can’t walk away from them. Regardless of who they are and what they do for a living.”

Pushing up from his desk, he stands and looks me directly in the eye. “He is just screwing you to get his hands on my money and my hotels.” He is now yelling at me. “But he made one fatal mistake. He can’t take what you don’t have and will never own. I have made sure of that.”

I take a deep breath and count to ten as I let it out because I don’t want to stoop to his level.

“You are wrong. And I feel sorry for you, that all you have ever seen in life is evil in people, that most of the time doesn’t even exist.” I think of my poor mother who at one time thought this man loved her and would treat her like a princess. Instead, he used her to get a child, which according to him she didn’t do right anyway. A failure, he called her, and then she became the witch in his eyes who was just after his money. I can’t imagine how much that hurt when the reality of the kind of man he was finally showed its face. He then slept with countless women and was never too discreet about it, making her feel worse than she already did.

“There is evil in everyone, including you. Turning against your own father. I raised you better than that.”

“Fuck. Off!” All my restraint is now gone, and this is becoming a screaming match. “You didn’t raise me, my mother did.”

“That money-grabbing whore knows nothing about business, and you would be spending your days in a hair salon if it were left to her to guide your life. I gave you everything—money, status, and a place in this business that was obviously a huge mistake. All you have done is disgrace the family name, and you continue to do it on a daily basis. A waste of the air you breathe. If I had a son, things would have been different.” He slams his clenched fist down on to the table, and my walls crumble around me.

For all the years I thought it, my father never came out and said it.

Nothing I ever do will be good enough for him to love me or be proud of me because I don’t have a Y chromosome.

The little girl who used to wait for her father to come home every night in the hope that he would play with her or read bedtime stories like my friends’ fathers did, I’m crying for her. But for the almost forty-year-old woman whose father secretly videoed her having sex and then shared it with the world to use against her, I’m standing tall. I’m going to bury this man.

“I don’t think the world could have tolerated another Kentwall male if he was anything like you. You disgust me.” Taking a deep breath to keep myself composed, I get the words straight in my head before I say it. It’s time to start the demise of Ewan Kentwall.

“There will be an email in your inbox tonight calling an extraordinary board meeting for next week where I will be presenting the evidence that my own father, the CEO of Kentwall Estates, videoed me having sex without my consent.”

His eyes open wide, and the whites of his eyeballs are a stark contrast to the blackness of his pupils. The moment of sheer panic is nothing I have ever seen from him, and although it only lasted a few seconds before he brought back his steel face, it is enough validation for me.

“Then leaked it to the media as a smear campaign after a false blackmail scheme. All to hang on to the control of our family company so he could keep hiding all his deep, dark secrets.” My heart is racing, hands sweating, and I feel like I want to vomit, but it is also mixed with a freeing feeling of finally getting it all out. “I will be raising a vote of no confidence against you and then instigating a full forensic audit on the company to find your sins. And you can choose to make this easy or hard. Step down now before the meeting and walk away to retirement. Or stand and fight and see where the cards fall. But I assure you this…” I lean forward, my hands gripping the front of his desk so tightly that it hurts, but it’s the fire inside me that has the furor pumping through my body. My face is now no more than a foot from his.

“You fight me on this, and I will turn this evidence over to the police and anything else I find as I keep digging. And I will happily also leak to the media what you have done, because you can’t hurt me any more than you already have.” Standing quickly, I turn away from him. My legs have me moving quickly before I explode with either rage or tears.

“How dare you say such preposterous things about me. You don’t call meetings, I do!” His roar behind me just bounces off me now, as my walls are up and so thick that I won’t let him in ever again.

“You have seven days. I expect your resignation on my desk by then… the choice is yours.”

Not looking back, my father continues to yell all sorts of disgusting things at me, but as the doors of the elevator opens and I enter, I turn slowly to see him storming toward me, and I don’t say a word. The doors closing in his face feel like it’s symbolic of me finally shutting him out of my life.

Now I just have to hope he crumbles to my demands, or I’m in for the biggest war of my life, and I doubt it will be pretty.

I quickly type out a text to both Harper and Flynn saying it’s done.

As I climb into the back of my car, the tears start to fall, and Imala doesn’t make a comment but just puts the car into drive and heads out into the Friday-night traffic in the direction of Flynn’s apartment.

But finally, the tears falling aren’t ones of despair from the argument but are more me crying for my lost childhood while I accept my new life moving forward with the only man who truly loves me. A life where I’m not sure what’s in store for me, but one thing I do know is that I will be the one who makes the choices of the direction it takes.

And it will be a life without my father in it.

CHERIE

I can’t believe I’m stupid enough to put myself back into this life.

My skin crawls as I sit in the back of the town car I ordered to take me down to the Tornado Bar in the central business district. It is what most would assume is a darkly lit, exclusive bar for the rich and famous. But upstairs in an area they call the VIP lounge, it is more than that. There are two rooms with illegal poker games happening, and depending on who you are and the money you bring to the table, it decides which room you get to play in.

When I visited on Wednesday night, I was taken into the lower-ranking room with an old associate that I used to run the streets of London with when my life was in a different place. I grew to change where I came from, and now, hopefully I’m also changing the direction of many of the kids I take into my programs. Ivan, instead, stayed in that life and grew up to be one of the big bosses in the underworld tobacco trade in this country. I don’t know much about his life now and don’t want to, but I knew if I asked for a favor he would agree without question.

I saved his life one night after a knife fight in a dark alley where he was left bleeding out. Calling for an ambulance I knew would also bring the cops, and that would lead to me being in trouble, but I couldn’t leave him there to die. I held my hand on his chest to try to stop the bleeding while we waited for help to arrive, and he looked up at me, fearing for his life, and told me that he owed me. Time to claim back the favor.

Even as we head into spring, the weather at night is still cool even with my overcoat on. I wonder if I really wore it to fight off the cold or for a sense of security when I’m feeling nervous about what I’m here to do.

I’m not stupid enough to look like my normal self. I have a short black wig on, with very heavy makeup that makes me feel so abnormal being this over the top. Green-colored contact lenses in to disguise my eye color and very high shoes to give an impression of being taller than I am. So not my style. Lots of fake gold costume jewelry that looks real and gives the appearance of wealth, and long artificial nails which I would never be caught dead wearing normally. Looking in the mirror before I left, I wondered if this is what I would have looked like if I had stayed in the world I was born into.

I look like trash in my eyes but a very high-class lady to others.

In a way, it reminds me of what my mother looked like before she died of a drug overdose. Visions I don’t really want to remember, but you can’t always bury things as far down as you would like inside you.

I spent this week reading all I could about Ewan Kentwall and built the profile of his character in my head. Of course, it didn’t show all the dark side of him, but everything that Felisha had told me in our quick phone call confirmed the image that I had built. He may have more money than any man in the games I used to be at, but it’s still the same thing.

An overall addiction to winning and being able to claim you are the best. The feeling of superiority in a room full of your peers and not willing to accept losing. With Ewan, we have the added layer of toxic masculinity where he will never accept a woman as an equal, let alone a level above him.

The game on Wednesday night, I played with Ivan and a few others, giving him the benefit of winning some hands, and I took all the rest. Of course, the others at the table weren’t happy and wanted to know who this newcomer was, but Ivan had my back the whole way, explaining that I had been in hiding in Majorca for a few years due to some heat I’d had with the UK authorities, and now I have come home to work for him.

He doesn’t know exactly why I need to be here, all I told him was that I need to help a friend whose father had wronged her from a very young age.

From where both Ivan and I have come from, we understand shit parents.

Pulling up to the bar, my driver lets me out, and I open the bar’s heavy wooden door to the smell of more than just tobacco. I take a seat at the bar where I can see the doorway, and I order a dirty martini and wait for Ivan to arrive. I might have been here two nights ago, but I’m far from being allowed to just walk into a game and place my money on the table. You need someone to vouch for you, and that someone has to already be trusted by the rest of them in the game.

I’m just hoping that Ewan will show up. If not, then I might need to lose a few games tonight and let them win back the money I took off them on Wednesday night. Otherwise, I might find myself on a few people’s target list, and that’s dangerous. I’ve already had days of fighting with Forrest over being here, and I can handle that. He is a man who needs to learn I don’t take orders or instructions from any man. I can see it comes from a good place, but through my life, lots of things appear to be from a good place, until they’re not, and then you are busy trying to find a safe place to hide. I don’t need that kind of drama on top of what I’m trying to do here. This takes concentration with no distraction for me to slide in under the radar and back out again before they know who I really am.

Halfway through sipping my drink—very slowly, because I need a clear head—I see the man I’m looking for storming across the room. Ewan Kentwall has arrived and looks like he is ready to explode. Which I find fascinating because from what I have read and heard from Felisha, he doesn’t like to show too much emotion. But anger is written all over his face. Trailed by two men who look like his security team, he doesn’t stop, just disappears behind the door that I know leads to the stairwell to take you upstairs.

Looks like tonight is it. I promised Remington that it would be a one-and-done night, teaching him a lesson, and then I walk away and disappear into the darkness of London again.

I message Remington that Ewan is here because he is the only one that I agreed to be in contact with. I don’t want my phone blowing up while I’m in the game. It’s a burner phone, and the only number in it is another burner phone that Rem has right now. It has tracking in it, because he insisted on it to keep me safe.

I actually feel sick, and I’m now regretting the decision to order the drink in front of me, a lot.

Thankfully it is only a few minutes later that Ivan walks in and makes his way toward me. Leaning down, he kisses me on the cheek, because at the end of the day we were friends back then, and he never did anything to hurt me. We may not agree on each other’s lives now, but that doesn’t stop me from being friendly.

Will we catch up for coffee after this all over… not a chance in hell, but he will feel better knowing he has paid his debt to me.

I can walk away knowing that all the dark things I did back then, I have been able to use to help someone now. Hopefully it will clean at least one of the points on the long list of marks against my name on the universe’s bad-person list.

“Ready to step in with the big boys tonight?” Ivan holds his hand out to help me off the bar stool.

“I was born ready.” And although that’s not completely true, I was born determined and some would say stubborn, which has served me well in life so far.

“Can you at least leave me with some money and dignity tonight? I know it’s part of the game, but find someone else to fleece.” He chuckles to himself as he links my arm in his, and we make our way to the room where the poker game will be in progress.

“Don’t worry, my mark is here tonight, so I’ll be concentrating all my efforts on him and will leave you enough to maybe purchase a beer or two.” I offer him my fake smile, when on the inside, my whole body is on high alert with nerves.

“You always were so generous.” The sarcasm oozes from him as we make it to the top of the stairs. “Now, there is another woman in the game tonight, but she isn’t much good. She has played here before, so it will make your appearance less of a surprise.”

“Perfect. I don’t want to stand out. They will already be wary because of my wins the other night. There will be talk, I’m sure.”

“More gossip than an old grannie knitting circle.” He winks at me as his hand is on the doorknob, ready to open it.

Taking a deep breath, I clear my mind of everything except what is happening behind that door. Pull the nerves back and push my wall of badass forward for the world to see. All they will see is a confident, sarcastic woman who doesn’t reveal one inch of what she is thinking or feeling in her body language.

“Let’s do it.” I take the step toward the door as Ivan opens it.

Why is it these poker rooms all smell the same, no matter how high the bets are on the table. Stale smoke, strong alcohol, and overpowering men’s cologne mixed with women’s perfume from the scantily clothed women that the owner of the bar provides to serve the men— and occasional women—drinks.

The movement of us entering the room goes mainly unnoticed by the players in the game, who are too busy concentrating on their opponents.

Yet one man who is waiting to the right side of the room for the next game to start looks up at me.

His eyes scan my body from top to toe and back again, looking into my eyes like he is trying to see into my soul. But it’s not in the way of a competitor; instead, it’s purely sexual.

He’s a predator, I can pick them a mile away.

But I can also feel the heat of a stare from the man on my left, Ewan. And there is a fire of rage burning inside of him. He isn’t looking at me, but instead, Ewan is fixated on the predator of a man across the room, who is checking me out. If I was to guess, Ewan is here to clear some rage and direct it at his opponent, and I doubt it has anything to do with the game of poker we are about to start.

My heart is racing again, even faster than it was before, because I wasn’t expecting him to be here.

I recognized him the moment he looked up at me. I suppose we could call tonight a jackpot, having both Ewan Kentwall and Fulton Anderson in the same game, but I’m not sure I would call it that.

This just adds another level of complication, but if anything, if fires me up to make them both pay for the way they have treated Felisha.

Two evil men in one room. Nothing I can’t handle.

I’m a woman, a multitasker. That’s what we do.

Time to start playing my game… oh, and some poker too.