- -
- 100%
- +
RUTHLESS
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
About the Author
Coming Next Month
CHAPTER ONE
LEAH DIDN’T STOP swimming till a full twenty laps were behind her.
Satisfied with her workout, she stroked over to the side of the pool and grabbed the silver handles on the ladder. As she hauled herself upwards out of the water, her gaze connected with her left thigh and the rough ridges of white skin that crisscrossed it.
Leah didn’t look away, as she usually did. Instead, she forced herself to study the scars in the early morning sunshine.
They had faded quite a bit over the past two years. But they were never going to go away, she accepted as she climbed out on to the tiled pool surround and reached for her towel.
Leah sighed. She wished her disfigurement didn’t bother her so much. It seemed pathetic to be upset about a few wretched scars when the car accident that had produced them had taken the life of her mother.
Nothing compared with that tragedy, not even Carl leaving her a few months after the accident. Though she’d been shattered at the time.
Leah clutched the towel tightly in her hands, rubbing at her scars less than gently as she recalled the expression on Carl’s face when he’d taken his first good look at her scarred leg. He’d been utterly revolted. And repulsed.
He’d made excuses not to make love to her for weeks after she came home from hospital, till finally he’d announced that he wanted a divorce, saying it was because she had changed.
Leah agreed that she had. During the long, painful weeks she’d been in hospital, she’d found a different person inside herself. A better person, she liked to think. A person with more character, and insight, and compassion.
Carl claimed she’d become far too serious and was no fun any more. Leah’s desperate argument that she’d just lost her mother and was naturally feeling sad made no impression on him at all.
His leaving her had nothing to do with her personality having changed, she thought bitterly. It was all to do with her scars. And her limp.
Well, the limp had long gone but the scars would never go. Not the scars on her legs. Or the scars on her heart.
Still, she’d finally come to terms with Carl’s calling it quits on her. After all, what woman would actually want to stay married to a man who could not tolerate a wife who was no longer physically perfect?
Which, before the accident, she had been. Or so she’d been told all her life.
Leah had been the image of her mother, a natural blonde with lovely green eyes, perfect teeth and skin, and a very pretty face and figure. Leah had grown up taking her good genes for granted. Taking her privileged lifestyle for granted as well.
As the only child of one of Sydney’s most successful stockbrokers, she’d never wanted for a thing. She’d been spoiled rotten all her life, her pampered upbringing producing a precious little society princess who thought the world was her oyster. Working for a living had never been on Leah Bloom’s agenda. She had a monthly allowance, plus a credit card. Why work nine to five in some dreary job?
When people had asked what she did for a living, she had told them she was an aspiring writer, a minor ambition that had come to her during her last year at school when her English teacher complimented her on one of her creative writing assignments. She’d even attended a fiction-writing course at one stage, bought herself a computer and started a chick-lit novel, which was little more than a diary of what she did every week.
Which meant extremely silly and shallow, Leah decided in hindsight.
How could it be anything else when her life was silly and shallow, every day filled with shopping and charity luncheons and idle hours spent in beauty salons getting ready for the evening’s outing. By the time Leah was twenty-one, she’d been to more parties and premieres and black-tie dos than she could count.
Falling in love and marrying Carl had been the icing on her seemingly never-ending cake. He’d been attractive and charming and rich. Very rich. Leah’s family didn’t mix with any other kind.
Carl had been thirty when they married, the heir to an absolute fortune made in diamonds. She’d been twenty-three.
They’d only been married for six months when the accident happened. Way too short a time for Carl to fall out of love with her. Leah had long come to the conclusion that she’d just been a trophy wife, a decoration on his arm to show off, a possession that he’d only valued when she’d been glitteringly perfect.
Once she’d become flawed, he hadn’t wanted her any more.
‘Mrs B. said to tell you breakfast will be ready in ten minutes,’ a male voice called out.
Leah glanced up to see her father leaning over the balcony that adjoined the master bedroom.
Dressed in his favourite navy silk dressing-gown and with a tan that a summer of swimming and yachting had produced, her father looked much younger than his sixty-two years. Of course, he did keep himself very fit in his home gym. A thick headful of expertly dyed brown hair didn’t hurt, either.
‘That’s the only reason I come home every weekend, you know,’ she replied. ‘For Mrs B.’s cooking.’
This was a lie, of course. She came home every weekend to spend time with her father, to feel his parental affection, up close and personal.
But Leah didn’t want to live at home twenty-four seven. Joachim Bloom was far too dominating a personality for that. Leah knew she would find herself giving in to him if she was always around, like her mother had. As happy as her parents had been in their marriage, Leah had always been well aware who was the boss in their relationship.
‘Rubbish!’ her father retorted. ‘You’re skinny as a rake.’
‘You can never be too thin,’ she quipped.
‘Or too rich,’ he finished for her. ‘Which reminds me, daughter, there’s something important I have to discuss with you over breakfast, so shake a leg.’
‘The good one?’ Leah shot back at him. ‘Or the gimpy one?’
Pretending to her father not to care about her scars had become a habit. She didn’t want him to know that they bothered her as much as they still did. Or that they were the reason she never went to the beach any more, or swam anywhere else but here, at home, when there was no one around but her father and Mrs B. to see them.
‘Very funny,’ he said with a roll of his eyes, and disappeared back inside.
Leah threw the towel over her shoulder and headed for her bedroom, one of six in the two-storeyed, waterside mansion that she’d been brought up in and which was probably worth many millions on the current market.
Vaucluse was the place to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
For a while after his mother’s death, her father had thought of selling the house and buying elsewhere, but Leah had talked him out of it. And she was so glad she had. It was a comfort at times, to be around her mother’s things. To feel her presence in the rooms.
Such beautiful rooms. Such a beautiful house, Leah thought wistfully as she climbed the curving staircase that led up to the bedrooms.
The thought didn’t come to Leah till she was in the shower that her father might have changed his mind about the house. He might still want to sell. Maybe that was what he wanted to discuss with her.
I won’t let him, she resolved as she snapped off the water. I’ll fight him to the death!
A couple of minutes later, she was running downstairs, dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a pink singlet top, her long damp hair up in a ponytail.
Joachim’s heart lurched as his daughter raced into the morning room. How like her mother she was! It was like looking at Isabel in her twenties.
‘If you think you’re going to sell this house, Daddy,’ Leah tossed at him with a feisty look as she sat down at the breakfast table, ‘then you can think again.’
Joachim sighed. Like her mother in looks, but not in personality. Isabel had been a soft sweet woman, always deferring to him. Never making waves.
Leah looked soft and sweet. When she’d been younger, she’d even been soft and sweet. But over the past eighteen months, she’d become much more assertive, and very independent. Not hard, exactly. But quite formidable and forthright.
But who could blame her for turning tough, came a more sympathetic train of thought. Carl had a lot to answer for. Fancy leaving Leah when she needed him the most. The man was a weasel and a coward. Joachim wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire.
His daughter had had two alternatives during that awful time in her life. Go to pieces, or develop a thicker skin.
For a while it had been touch and go. Joachim was very proud that Leah had eventually pulled herself together and moved on.
‘No, Leah,’ he told her with a reassuring smile. ‘I’m not selling the house. I know how much you love it.’
Leah’s relief was only temporary. Then what did Daddy want to talk to her about?
‘What’s up, then?’ she asked as she reached for a slice of toast from the silver toast rack. ‘You’re not going to make a fuss about my working, are you? I thought you were proud of my getting a job.’
Perhaps surprised would have been a better description of her father’s reaction. When Leah had first mentioned a year ago that she was going to find a job, her stunned father had asked her what on earth she thought she could do.
‘Even waitresses have to have experience these days!’ he’d told her.
Leah understood his scepticism after she went to have her resumé done. Because there was nothing much she could put on it, except a very average pass in her Higher School certificate—studying had not been high on Leah’s society princess agenda—plus that very brief creative writing course. She had absolutely no qualifications for employment other than her social skills and her looks and a limited ability to use a computer.
Which was why the only job she’d been able to find after attending endless interviews was as a receptionist. Not at some flashy establishment in the city, either. She currently worked for a company that manufactured beauty products, and had their factory and head office at Ermington, a mainly industrial suburb in western Sydney.
‘I am proud of your getting that job,’ her father insisted. ‘Extremely.’
Mrs B., coming in with a plate piled high with scrambled eggs, hash browns, fried tomato and bacon, interrupted their conversation for a moment.
‘This looks delicious, Mrs B.,’ Leah complimented her father’s housekeeper as she placed the plate in front of her.
Leah was privately thankful that she only had to eat Mrs B.’s breakfast one day a week, or she’d have a backside as big as a bus.
‘Just make sure you eat it all,’ Mrs B. said with a sharp glance at Leah. ‘You’re getting way too thin, missie.’
‘You won’t catch yourself another husband with that waif look, you know,’ her father agreed.
Leah could have pointed out that she turned down several offers of dates every week. Instead, she smiled sweetly and tucked into the food till Mrs B. left the room. Then she put down her knife and fork and looked straight at her father.
‘I have no intention of getting married again, Daddy.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘Not every man is as weak as Carl,’ he grumbled. ‘You’re a beautiful young woman, Leah. You should have a husband. And babies.’
‘I don’t want to argue about this, Daddy. I just want you to know my feelings on the matter so that I don’t have to put up with that kind of comment any more.’
‘You’ll change your mind,’ he said. ‘One day, you’ll meet the right man and fall in love and that will be that. Nature will have her way with you. You mark my words.’
Leah suppressed a sigh. She’d been marking her father’s words all her life. She loved him to death, but over the past two years she’d come to realise he was an incredible bossy-boots who thought he knew what was best for everyone.
‘Can we move on, please?’ she said, picking up a piece of crispy bacon with her fingers, and munching into it. ‘You wanted to discuss something with me?’ she asked between swallows. ‘I presume it didn’t have anything to do with my remarrying. It sounded like it was about money. Which reminds me. Don’t start telling me what I can and cannot do with the income from my trust fund, either. It is my money to do with as I please. Mum made no conditions on her legacy in her will. If I want to give it all away, I can. Not that I am. Yet. At the moment, I have to keep some back each month to make ends meet.’
‘I don’t wonder,’ her father said. ‘From what I recall, you only earn a pittance.’
‘The women in the factory earn even less,’ Leah pointed out. ‘Yet some of them bring up a family on their salary. My aim is to support myself on my salary alone. It will do my character good to see how the other half lives. It’s just taking a while for my champagne taste to catch up with my beer income. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked, and munched into the bacon again.
‘Eat your breakfast first. I see you’re enjoying it. We’ll talk over coffee afterwards.’
Leah’s curiosity was intense by the time she cleared her plate and picked up her coffee cup. ‘Well?’ she said after a couple of sips. ‘Out with it.’
‘What do you know about the takeover of Beville Holdings?’
‘What? You mean it’s a done deal?’ Leah asked with alarm in her voice. So far there had only been rumours at work of a possible takeover. But lots of Leah’s fellow employees were genuinely worried.
Leah had heard from more than one source that when companies were taken over, they were invariably subjected to ‘restructuring’. Leah had been chatting to one of their newest reps on Friday, a really nice man with a wife and young family. He told Leah that new management always pruned staff and usually adopted a policy of last-in-first-out, regardless of ability. Apparently, Peter had lost his previous job that way and was worried sick about the same thing happening again.
‘Yes, it’s a done deal,’ her father confirmed. ‘There’s an article about it in the business section of the Sunday paper here. Plus a photo of your new boss, Jason Pollack.’
‘Jason Pollack,’ Leah repeated, the name not ringing a bell. ‘Never heard of him.’ Leah might not have joined the workforce till late in her life, but she’d been brought up on dinner table discussions about the wheeler dealers of this world whose faces and names often graced the dailies.
‘Not all that many people have,’ her father informed her. ‘He keeps a very low media profile.’
‘Show me,’ she said, and her father passed across the relevant pages.
‘Goodness!’ Leah exclaimed, having expected to see a photo of a man who was at least middle-aged. And a good deal fatter.
Takeover tycoons were rarely this young. Or this slim.
Or this handsome.
Something inside Leah tightened when her eyes met those of Jason Pollack’s. Dark brown, they were. And deeply set, hooded by eyebrows that were as straight and uncompromising as his mouth. His hair was black. And wavy. Brushed neatly back from his high forehead with no part. His nose was straight, with widely flared nostrils, his jawline squared off, with a small dimple in its centre.
‘Is this an old photo?’ she asked brusquely.
‘Nope,’ her father said. ‘If you read the article, you’ll see he’s only thirty-six. He’s very good looking, isn’t he?’
‘I suppose so,’ Leah said. ‘If you like the type.’ Which she obviously did. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Yet he was nothing like Carl, who’d been big and blond, a Nordic giant of a man with a raw-boned handsomeness.
Jason Pollack’s face had a model-like quality, probably because of the perfect symmetry of his finely sculptured features.
Yet no one would mistake him for a male model. There was an air about him that was unmistakably magnate material. A maturity in his eyes—and an intelligence—that Leah found both attractive and irritating.
Irritating because she didn’t want to find the new boss of Beville Holdings in any way attractive. She didn’t want to find any man attractive for a long, long time.
‘How on earth did he get to be so rich and successful so young?’ she queried sharply. ‘I know he’s not old money. I would have met him before, if he was.’
‘Nope. He was an immigrant from Poland, brought over here by his father after his mother died in childbirth. He grew up in the Western suburbs and never even went to university. Started in sales straight out of school.’
‘Must have been a very good salesman to acquire so much in such a short time,’ Leah said.
‘Seems so. But he also married into money when he was in his late twenties. His wife was his first employer’s widow. Her husband owned the WhizzBiz Electronics chain of shops. Jason Pollack sold himself to his new lady boss within a year of her husband’s demise. She herself died of cancer a couple of years later, leaving her adored young husband everything. Admittedly, by then, he had reversed WhizzBiz’s dwindling sales. After his wife’s death, he sold the whole chain for an enormous price. That’s become Pollack’s trademark. He buys ailing companies, fixes them up, then sells them.
‘But only if he thinks fixing is feasible,’ her father continued whilst Leah kept staring at Jason Pollack’s photo. ‘He reveals in that article that on one occasion, after he gained access to the company’s records and employees, he judged that a salvage operation simply wasn’t on. So he cut his losses and dismantled the company altogether, selling off whatever assets were involved.’
‘Regardless of the poor employees,’ she scorned.
‘I gather he gave each of them more than their entitlements.’
‘Which he could well afford,’ she snapped, dragging her eyes away from Jason Pollack to scan the rest of the article. The man had to be worth squillions, his current residence being the top floor of a skyscraper in the middle of Sydney’s city and business district.
‘Maybe, but he didn’t have to, Leah. The man has a good reputation for being more than fair. Look, Beville Holdings has not made a profit for two years now. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Whether Beville Holdings is salvageable, or not?’
Leah frowned. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I happen to own a nice little parcel of Beville Holdings shares. Bought them two years ago when they were rock bottom. Are they going to increase in value?’
‘According to this article they’ve already gone up a lot.’
‘Yes, but they’ll go up a lot more in the end if Pollack can work his usual miracle. So tell me, daughter, can your company be turned around, or do you think your new boss will sell it off in pieces?’
‘How on earth would I know?’ Leah replied, tossing the paper back over to her father to stop herself from staring at the infernal man any more.
‘Come now, Leah, don’t be coy. You’re one of those girls everyone tells everything to. People like to confide in you. I’ve seen it for myself many times. You’ve been at that company for over eight months now. I’ll bet you know exactly what’s going on there. Just because you didn’t put your mind to your studies at school doesn’t mean you didn’t inherit my brains. You’re smart as a whip, when you want to be.’
‘I wasn’t too smart when I married Carl.’
‘That’s different. Love can make a fool of even the smartest person. Now give me an honest opinion. Is my investment going to grow?’
Leah thought about all the information she had gleaned at work over the past few months.
Her father was right. People did like to confide in her. More so now than ever. Since the accident, she’d developed a genuinely compassionate ear, whereas before, her being a good listener had just been a social skill, learned from her mother.
Leah knew exactly what was wrong with Beville Holdings. The problems were fixable. If the new boss knew where to look, and whose advice to take.
‘Beville Holdings has excellent products,’ came her carefully worded reply. ‘But poor management. I think your shares will increase in value.’
Joachim smiled. Smart girl, his daughter. Smart and beautiful and not cut out to spend her life being a receptionist out in the boondocks. Or for living alone, for that matter.
Joachim could understand that her husband’s defection had hurt her terribly. But life went on.
Leah was only twenty-six. Time for her to start dating again. But he couldn’t force the issue. He’d have to be subtle. Maybe he’d surprise her with a dinner party for next Saturday night, invite a few old friends, people he knew she liked. But he’d also slip in someone new, some handsome, highly eligible young man who might impress her.
But who?
Joachim couldn’t think of anyone. With a sigh he picked up the paper again and found himself staring down at the photograph of Jason Pollack. Suddenly, a voice whispered to him that he should invite him. Jason Pollack.
Joachim’s first reaction was hell, no. Not some ambitious bastard who’d married for money. But the voice insisted. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was Isabel, whispering to him. Isabel, who hadn’t liked Carl one bit and who’d said Leah needed to marry a different type of man. A stronger, self-made man.
Isabel had been right about Carl.
Jason Pollack was a strong man, Joachim told himself. And a self-made man. A man who could probably do with a new wife. A younger one this time who could give him children.
Joachim still had his doubts, but that soft voice was very persistent.
All right, he whispered back in his head.
Don’t tell Leah, the voice added.
Joachim flicked a quick glance across the table at his daughter.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Nothing.’
But the die was set. He would invite Pollack to dinner, and he would not tell Leah. Which left him with the problem of getting her to attend. Not an easy task.
But he would persuade her. Somehow.
CHAPTER TWO
LEAH TURNED INTO the driveway of Beville Holdings, stopping at the security gate and smiling over at Ted, the man who manned the gate on the morning shift. Usually, he just smiled back and pressed the button that lifted the barrier, allowing her to drive through.
Today, Ted slid back the window and waved for Leah to wind her window down. Which she did.
‘He’s here,’ he called to her in a conspiratorial voice. ‘The new boss.’
‘What?’ Leah’s stomach twisted into an instant knot. She’d expected Jason Pollock to show up at work sooner or later, but not this soon.
‘Didn’t you read about the takeover in yesterday’s paper?’ Ted asked her.
‘Er…no, I didn’t,’ Leah replied, not wanting to seem too on the ball. She didn’t exactly play a blonde bimbo role at work, but at the same time, she didn’t drop any clues over who she really was. She liked it that she was treated as a simple working-class girl from Gladesville. No one at Beville Holdings had ever been to her waterview apartment or connected her surname—Johannsen—with the diamond dynasty.