9. You’ve got a deal
You’ve got a deal
Mike
“Hello, young man.”
“Sh–sugar—hey, Margot.”
Bloody hell, the woman came out of nowhere.
Totally freaky. But that was Margot for you, always popping up where you least expected her.
It was the same when we were kids. Margot would suddenly appear out of nowhere, and she always seemed to know what was going on.
She was the type of woman who’d know everything about everyone and would manipulate things as she saw fit, which made her a scary motherfucker in my opinion.
Despite that, I still liked Margot. She was so posh, it was almost as though she broke through class divides with the sheer force of her aristocratic bearing. Nobody said no to Margot. But she was fucking hilarious as well. Always up for a laugh and always had a twinkle in her eye.
“Gosh, aren’t you jumpy,” she said with a small smirk.
I was sitting on one of the many garden benches at Buckingham Manor, kicking a stone with the toe of my boot and thinking that I should probably be getting back to my workshop, but not wanting to leave just yet without seeing Vicky again.
There was open lawn all around me. Margot really had appeared out of nowhere. Like I said—scary, but kind of cool.
“But then, in my experience,” Margot said with that eye twinkle again. “It’s always the big, burly chaps who have the most nervous dispositions.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I do not have a nervous disposition,” I said through my teeth, and one of her eyebrows went up.
“Tell that to the little boy who ran away screaming when The Hulk arrived for my son’s birthday party.”
Heat flooded my face. When was I going to live that down? “I was four, Margot. And that bastard was massive. How was I to know it was just Jimbo from The Badger’s Sett?”
“None of the other children were scared, darling. It’s okay to be sensitive, you know.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not sensitive.”
She hummed but didn’t reply as she sat next to me on the bench.
“I love Vicky,” she said out of the blue after a full minute of silence.
I shifted uncomfortably on my seat and aimed a good bit of side-eye at the old bird. “Yes, okay.”
She turned further to me before she spoke again. “She thinks she’s difficult to love. But she’s not.”
My throat felt tight. How much did Margot know?
“She thinks she doesn’t fit here, that we’re not her real family, so we’re just putting up with her.
Have you noticed how she emphasises half -brother and half -sister when she talks about my biological children?
How she won’t claim Buckingham Manor in any way as one of her homes, just somewhere she’s allowed to visit? ”
I cleared my throat. “Is that… is it because she?—?”
“Because she’s my husband’s bastard?”
My back shot straight at Margot’s words. “Hey.” I growled, fully ready to throw down.
How dare Margot call Vicky that?
“It’s okay, Mike,” Margot said with amusement in her tone.
“You can relax. I didn’t mean that as an insult to Vicky.
She can’t help the circumstances of her birth.
But that is how she thinks of herself. How she’s been made to feel by everyone, and even, I’m ashamed to say this, but even by me at first. It took me longer than it should have done to warm up to that little girl, and I’ll carry that guilt around for the rest of my life.
She was six when I first met her, and it was all quite a shock.
My feelings were hurt, and I was humiliated.
I put up with her like the martyr I felt I was, and interacted with her the minimum amount I could get away with that summer.
This wasn’t hard. As you know, the child didn’t speak.
“Now, Ollie, my beautiful, wonderful Oliver, was different. He accepted her immediately. All his anger was directed rightfully towards his father. Claire still struggles with it, and that’s made her… distant from Vicky.
“But for me… one day, I came into the kitchen, and there she was. This silent child just staring out of the patio doors. So still and small. My kids were good eaters. They were loud, and they seemed to be always moving, but Vicky, even though she was a lot younger than both of them, was so so still. The only way I even knew she was alive was the rise and fall of her chest. Then she looked at me. I think it was the first time I really made eye contact with her. Vicky’s never been the best with eye contact, and it wasn’t like I was seeking it out either.
When I looked into those blue eyes, carbon copies of my own children’s, I could suddenly see so much working behind them that I had to look away.
That’s the thing with Vicky—a lot of the time, the calmer she is on the surface, the more is going on inside.
I vowed that day to treat Vicky like one of my own children.
And I did. Her mother is… well, of course, I don’t have a high opinion of the woman, seeing as she slept with my husband for years behind my back, but she is also one of the most vile people on the planet.
“So Vicky’s had a raw deal overall, and I’m simply not prepared to let it continue. I want that girl to have what she wants. I want her to have everything she wants. And as I’m sure you’re aware, Michael Mayweather, she wants you .”
I started coughing then, the shock of her words prompting me to choke on my own spit. What the hell? Was Margot trying to act like Vicky’s pimp or something? Or maybe, as my pimp? What was going on?
“Margot, I’m not sure what you?—?”
“Oh, don’t be tedious, Michael,” Margot said as she waved her hand in the air dismissively as if to dispel my so-called tediousness. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Now, down to the negotiations.”
“Negotiations?” My voice was pitched higher than it had been for many years now. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I want you to make a concerted effort to woo Vicky.”
My eyebrows went up. “ Woo her? You do realise this is not the eighteen-hundreds anymore, Margot?”
She rolled her eyes. “Men have been wooing women since the beginning of time, young man.”
“What if she doesn’t want to be wooed?” I said, some grumpiness leaking into my voice. I was still a little salty at how Vicky reacted to that kiss, and the fact she now thought we wouldn’t work.
“Believe me, she does. I have a schedule for you. There are some upcoming events that the whole family will be attending, and now, so will you.”
“Events?” I said warily. “What kind of events?”
“Black-tie kind of events. I presume you have a dinner jacket?”
“I’m not being trussed up in some monkey suit just to act as your gigolo, Margot,” I said, my tone even grumpier now.
“Yes, you will,” she said simply.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Michael, have you heard of Highcliffe Investments?”
I blinked, and my mouth went dry. “Of course, I’d heard of them.
They were my main backer to expand the business.
” Lucy had offered, as had my two billionaire best friends, but I wanted to do it myself.
The chip I had on my shoulder wouldn’t allow any other way.
And my sister had already helped Mum out, buying her a house of all things.
I didn’t want her giving me money as well.
“Hmm.” Margot hummed, looking out at the garden now instead of making eye contact.
“That was fortunate, wasn’t it? An outside investor coming in at just the right time.
Just when you needed the capital to expand but didn’t want to go to your successful author little sister and her billionaire boyfriend. ”
My heart was hammering now. Everything I had rested on that investment.
I’d just taken on an apprentice. We were making more profit than ever, and it was all possible because of the amazing deal I managed to get with Highcliffe Investments, who valued the company much higher than anyone else I’d approached.
“It would be a shame if that investment was pulled, wouldn’t it?” she said as she continued to study the horizon.
I felt a surge of anger as my pulse beat in my ears.
“I do not enjoy being manipulated, Margot,” I said in a low, angry tone that would make grown men shudder in fear.
This little middle-aged lady just shrugged and gave me a small smile.
“And I don’t enjoy seeing my beautiful, sensitive stepdaughter being turned down repeatedly by the blind idiot who I know could make her happy if he stopped being so bloody stubborn.
Hence my founding of Highcliffe Investments for the sole purpose of providing you with the incentive you needed to make Vicky happy . ”
I blinked at the ground and took a deep breath.
If it were a couple of weeks ago, before I’d delivered that damn coffee table to Vicky’s scarily tidy but soulless house, before I’d seen her in that oversized T-shirt with no make-up on and her hair shimmering in the sun, before I’d tasted her, then I know I would have told Margot to fuck off and take her investment with her.
I’d built up my company before, and I could do it again, with or without Highcliffe Investments.
But seeing as I’d been tortured by dreams of Vicky for weeks, and no other woman even vaguely appealed to me now—plus, in my mind, the moment she swayed towards me in the Orangery Vicky became mine—there was no harm in letting Margot think her blackmail worked.
Okay, so I had to wear a monkey suit—it meant I got to see Vicky again, which is something I’d fully intended to engineer anyway.
Why not let Margot think she’d won this one?
“You’ve got a deal,” I said.
I didn’t realise at the time, but I would come to regret those words more than anything else I’d ever said in my whole life.