The CEO(10)

He glanced down at her with a wry smile before turning his attention back to the ocean. ‘Everyone in Sydney’s obsessed with a view. The Harbour. The beach. You know what I want from this place?’

A bachelor pad, she wondered. Somewhere to bring all those starlets and supermodels and socialites. ‘What would that be?’

Callum thought for a long moment, rubbed his chin and then turned to her. ‘Peace and quiet,’ he said. ‘Privacy. A place to come home to where I can leave all the shit behind. That’s what I saw when I found this place.’

‘Oh,’ Ava said on a breath. Some of the tension left her shoulders, a tightness she’d been carrying since she’d got into his car back at the cemetery.

She understood what he meant. Not only had he lived almost his whole life in the public eye—the son of one of Sydney’s establishment families, their business successes, the analysis of his family fortune, his marriage to a waitress making front page news in the papers—but when the news of his and Lulu’s divorce had leaked, they’d both been hounded by the media. Ava had no idea how Callum had handled it all, if it was anything like the attention Lulu had endured. She’d been hunted by the paparazzi like she was someone famous instead of the ordinary person she was and had always been proud to be. She’d married someone well-known, but had never wanted the spotlight or the attention for herself. Lulu had never said much to Ava about it, preferring to keep her own counsel as she always had, but on one occasion they’d been having lunch at a cafe in Bondi and the hounds had descended. And it wasn’t just one of them: it felt like a hundred, like a pack of dogs baying for blood. And then other diners whipped out their smartphones, wondering if the sisters were famous, and took photos just in case, and the whole thing felt horrid and invasive and downright abusive. And then there were the questions, shouted out aggressively to get a rise out of Lulu.

‘You gonna sue Malone for half of everything?’

‘Is it true you caught him shagging another woman?’

‘Or was it another bloke?’

‘Is that your girlfriend? Have you turned, Lulu?’

Ava didn’t know how she’d done it, but Lulu had kept a calm expression behind her big sunglasses and held Ava back from wanting to punch each and every one of the bastards who’d spent weeks stalking her little sister. After that incident, Lulu had left the city and driven up to the Blue Mountains to stay with a friend for a couple of weeks. She had laid low until some other scandal caught the media’s eyes and they turned their attention to the next poor unfortunate soul.

There was something about Lulu that had always been sensitive and delicate and Ava knew what that did to men. They adored her, worshipped her, and her fragility inspired in the men who loved her an almost primal instinct to protect her. And when the shit had hit the fan, Callum hadn’t been able to protect her from the lies and the innuendo, the rumours and the gossip, all of his creation. In Ava’s eyes, that only made his betrayal worse.

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘Pardon?’

‘A coffee, maybe? A glass of wine?’ Callum uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, his gaze remaining focused on the waves and the distance. ‘God knows, I need one. Or three.’

‘No, not at the moment,’ Ava managed to say, trying so, so hard not to let her voice hitch in her throat. ‘But thank you anyway.’

And in that moment, she remembered why she was with him today, next to this beautiful man in his beautiful house. He’d buried his father. And what had she done? She’d been so caught up in protecting herself, about keeping her shield of emotional armour wrapped tightly around her own heart, that she’d hadn’t thought that his might be hurting. Whatever he’d done, today he was a man who was grieving.

‘Callum.’ Ava turned to face him and reached a hand out, rested it on his arm.

He glanced down where her fingers splayed on his forearm and then met her eyes, his own dark and full of gloom.

Oh God.

The realisation struck her like a slap to the face.

She was a horrible person. She hadn’t said it. She hadn’t said any words to him of sympathy or given him any acknowledgement that she understood what he was going through and she had to say it now, before the others arrived. Her mask slipped. Tears welled and she swiped them away, as embarrassed by them now as she had been her whole life.

‘I didn’t say …’ Ava could feel a sob growing and bit the inside of her lip to hold it at bay. ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’ Without thinking, she took a step closer to him, wanting to be a comfort to the man who had just lost his only surviving parent. ‘I know this must be a hard day for you.’