Marrying the Enemy

‘When hell freezes over.’

CHAPTER THREE

IT TOOK a good ten minutes of pacing the showroom after Jax left for Ruby’s blood pressure to lower.

She’d never been prone to rage or theatrics but in the last half-hour she’d almost succumbed to both.

Who the hell did Jax Maroney think he was?

She’d been so irate over his offer she’d forgotten to ask how he’d got onto the exclusive invite-only guest list. Probably greased someone’s palm, like his dear old dad.

Unfair? Maybe, but she wasn’t in a forgiving mood. Livid, she snatched the evening’s inventory list from behind the chrome counter and scanned it again, hoping a few more gold foil sale stickers would’ve miraculously appeared since she’d checked it with Opal.

Nope, still the same glaring truth: they’d barely made enough tonight to cover their gem costs.

Her fingers convulsed, crumpling the paper, and she threw it back on the counter.

Tears of helplessness burned as she stared at the inventory list, taking time to smooth it flat so Opal wouldn’t guess how bad things really were.

Her cousin had stepped in to help when Sapphie had been ordered by the medicos to have time off, leaving behind her precious mine to become general dogsbody around here.

She couldn’t have kept the place going without Opal’s help and had planned on giving her a generous gift—a matching opal ring and bracelet—when her stint finished.

The way things were going, she wouldn’t be able to afford even the setting, let alone the rare black opals she had in mind.

Her gut twisted as she slid open the top drawer behind the counter and extracted an envelope. She weighed it in her hand, tapping it against her palm, as reluctant to open it now as she had been earlier this afternoon when it had been delivered.

She didn’t want to spoil the launch; that had been her excuse then. So what was her excuse now?

Out of options, she slid her finger beneath the flap and ripped, wishing she could tear up the contents before she read it. But disposing of it wouldn’t change facts: Seaborn’s was mortgaged up to the hilt and needed a cash injection fast.

The bank’s letterhead taunted her as she glanced at the document, the exorbitant figures swimming before her eyes.

She didn’t blame Sapphie for mortgaging the title on the showroom and her apartment to pay for their mum’s exorbitant medical bills. She would’ve done the same if she’d known the truth, anything to buy them time and a chance at saving the business.

Now, with creditors baying for repayments, they were in danger of losing the one thing Sapphie had promised their mother they would save.

She couldn’t let it happen. She wouldn’t.

There had to be something she could do.

With a heavy heart, she trudged into her workroom tucked away in the far right corner. She couldn’t create, not in this bleak mood, but she had sorting to do.

Best she keep busy. She wouldn’t sleep tonight anyway.

* * *

Jax opened the door to his apartment, shoved his iPod into the docking station and hit play.

He reeled back from a blast of bass. Good. He needed loud. Louder the better to drown out his thoughts.

The noise filled the apartment as he walked along a marble-tiled hallway, the decibels hitting eardrum-shattering levels in the open lounge.

The beat pounded through him. Hard. Harsh.

Yeah, he needed this, needed to obliterate the tension of the last few hours.

He flung his suit jacket onto the couch, stalked across to the bar, poured himself a double-shot whiskey and sculled it.

The deafening riffs spilling from a state-of-the-art surround-sound system matched his mood. Raucous. Discordant. Abrasive.

He slammed the glass down, the blaring noise a perfect match for his inner darkness.

He would’ve rather flung the glass at the nearest wall and watched it shatter with a ‘screw you, you stuck-up snobs’.

Being professionally snubbed by his fellow corporate mining giants tonight had seriously rankled.

Personally, he didn’t care what the high society his father had ripped off thought of him, but he needed them to expand his business and that meant attending functions like tonight.

A major pain in the ass.

He needed to re-enter their business circles, needed to convince them he was nothing like his morally corrupt father. Schmoozing the upper echelon of corporate Melbourne was a necessary evil for what he had planned with Maroney Mine expanding beyond the west coast.

But the way they’d looked at him earlier, as if he was the worse kind of scum... Damn it, how could he score business meetings with a hostile crowd who wouldn’t even acknowledge him?

He braced himself against the window sill, oblivious to the million-dollar view of Melbourne many storeys below, tension bunching his shoulders.

He deliberately played techno-punk-grunge when he was this wound up. No lyrics. All racket. Music far removed from his parents’ favourites, Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi.

Great, just what he didn’t need after the evening he’d had, thinking about his folks.

He’d been doing a lot of it lately with Denver’s appeal looming and the constant media harassment begging him for any snippets he could provide. While he’d told them to shove it—in more polite terms, of course—he half expected his mum to show up to vouch for the old crook.

He couldn’t fathom why a beautiful, wealthy woman like Jacqueline Blaise had stuck by his deceitful dad following his arrest when the ugly truth had finally spilled out.

Until her double betrayal. Then everything became frighteningly clear.

He’d been twenty-four when Denver had been jailed for embezzling millions, when he’d known deep in his heart that Jackie had also been an accessory despite the police never finding proof of her culpability.

She’d introduced Denver to her rich friends.

She’d cultivated a high-society clique that included Denver despite knowing the criminal background he’d come from. Apparently Denver’s own father had been murdered in a drug deal gone wrong, a petty criminal trying to rip off a dealer.

His folks never talked of it but Jax had looked it up on the Net when he was thirteen, after he’d overheard Gran berating Jackie for her shoddy taste in men. After reading the full story on his grandfather, Jax remembered feeling relieved that his dad was nothing like that.

What a joke.

His mum also hadn’t blinked twice about helping Denver rip off her moneyed friends, people her family had known for decades.