think we should do it.”

Nate was at his desk and Victor was sitting across from him. They were going over some figures for a proposed deal that Victor very much wanted to do.

Nate was staring out the window and wondering what was wrong with Lily.

She was guarded, she was being secretive and there was something she wasn’t telling him.

He didn’t want to push her. After Jeff cornered her, she could have forced Nate to bare his soul about his past but she told him she’d wait until he was ready. Although he wanted to force her to share with him whatever was bothering her, he thought it best to take her cue and wait until she was ready to share.

Nate had no idea how to behave in a healthy relationship. He could easily cope with dysfunction, indifference, malice and greed but he was hopelessly out of his depth with Lily.

He knew she wanted more from him but it was something he couldn’t give. He didn’t want to do anything that would make her turn away, make the shining light that blazed in her eyes whenever she looked at him even dim, much less go away.

He had stood behind Lily and Jeff listening to Lily chose him, feeling for the first time in his life a fierce pride in himself that this magnificent creature would want him, would chose him. At the same time he wished for Jeff to tell her, tell her whatever it was he knew, tell her so it would be out in the open.

Jeff didn’t do it which was both a continued burden at the same time it was an immense relief.

Nate even entertained thoughts of packing her up, taking her away, going back to Indiana with her and leaving his past behind forever. He didn’t want to hang onto who he was anymore, he didn’t want it to destroy his life and what he hoped to build with Lily.

But he couldn’t do that, he could never leave. He owed everything he was to Victor and Laura and that came with Jeff and Danielle.

Nate was existing on borrowed time when it came to Lily.

Therefore, as always, he had a plan.

“Nathaniel?”

Nate’s head jerked around to look at his father and Victor lifted up the papers they were supposed to be going over as a reminder to his distracted son.

“No,” Nate stated flatly.

“You don’t want to do it?” Victor asked in disbelief.

“It’s too much of a risk.”

“Ho, ho, hoooo…” His father drew out his last “ho” grandly. “You’re getting soft.” He stared knowingly at Nate and Nate knew he meant Lily.

“Not soft, Victor. That deal’s a train wreck,” Nate responded calmly.

“Two weeks ago, you would have been all over this,” Victor volleyed.

“Two weeks ago, those papers were on my desk. I read through them and tossed them in the bin,” Nate returned.

Victor’s eyes rounded. “Jeff brought this to me two days ago.”

“Jeff wants the deal and I also told Jeff no.”

No more needed to be said about Jeff or the deal. Jeff had lost the company enough money making foolish decisions, not taking advice and not thinking things through

Nate, however, had been the driving force behind their success and both Victor and Jeff knew it. Victor was always a ruthless risk taker but it was Nate who assessed their options and advised the route. Victor always took Nate’s advice. Nate, in turn, had never been wrong and Victor had never been sorry.

Furthermore, Jeff was a sore subject for Nate especially after dinner the other night and Victor knew that as well. Knew it well enough to make certain that Nate didn’t see Jeff anywhere, not at the house or at the office.

Victor threw the dismissed papers on Nate’s desk and then sat back.

“So, no deal. Let’s talk about something else. How’s Lily?”

The phone rang in his outer office and no one answered it. His secretary was out sick and HR was having troubles getting a temp to replace her.

Nate ignored it and told his father, “She’s fine.”

“You gonna marry her?” Victor asked.

At this blunt query, Nate decided to turn his attention to the window again.

“Son, I asked you a question,” Victor said quietly but kindly. He was never menacing to Nate, as he still could be, very much so. Firstly, Nate wouldn’t respond to it. Secondly, Victor held Nate in too much esteem. Thirdly, Nate was not the type of man who could be menaced.

“I think Lily needs things to slow down,” Nate finally answered.

“Take my advice,” Victor said and Nate’s eyes shifted to him again, “get the girl pregnant. It worked for me with Laura.” After saying this, he grinned cheekily.

Nate nearly flinched at his words but he stopped himself.

“Victor, you’ve been married thirty years and Jeff’s twenty-eight.” Nate didn’t believe his father and thought he was being purposefully shocking to get his point across.

“She lost it. It was a boy,” Victor announced and Nate stared in stunned surprise as Victor’s jaw clenched. Nate had never heard this story. “She says it took her fourteen years to get him back.”

At these quiet words, Nate felt like Victor had punched him in the gut. He didn’t let on to this extreme reaction, he just nodded once to his father.

Then, the mood already turned, Victor decided to go with it.

“Laura was the best thing that happened to me. I was a thug, worse, and I had no business being with her. I knew it, Nathaniel, right to my bones. But nothing was going to stop me from having her, nothing. It wasn’t the right thing to do, fuck, wasn’t even the nice thing to do but I did it. I got her pregnant and I did it on purpose. I’d have done anything to bind her to me.”

Nate kept his silence and kept his outward calm but his father’s words were slamming into him like hammers.

“You and me, son, we’re a lot alike. I don’t know the way you process things because you’re a helluva lot smarter than me, but I know how you think.”

Nate turned his attention back to the window.

Then he told his father, “Lily was a virgin.”

“I know,” Victor replied.

Nate’s body stilled at this comment. Victor, somehow, always seemed to know everything.

Even though Nate didn’t ask, Victor went on to explain, “She confided in me you were her first date.”

Nate’s eyes turned again to his father at that bit of news. He could barely credit it.

As usual Victor seemed to know what Nate was thinking even though he hadn’t said a word. “I know, shocked me too but I swear she wasn’t lying. She was nervous as a cat.”

This made Nate smile.

Victor went on. “Lucky you had a motorcycle that broke the ice.” With that, Victor grinned at him.

Uncharacteristically, Nate decided a confidence was in order and he shared his plan.

“She hasn’t brought up the subject of birth control.”

Victor watched him closely. “I reckon you haven’t been seeing to it.”

Nate shook his head, this he also did once.

Victor beamed. “We think alike, you and me, always have.”

As Victor had said, it wasn’t the right thing to do and it certainly wasn’t a nice thing to do but Nate didn’t care. If he thought she was likely to leave him, he would have chained her to the bed. Making her pregnant would bind her to him for life. He knew that and he wanted it and he was going to do it.

If she was pregnant, she wouldn’t leave him. Family meant more to her than anything in the world. She made that perfectly clear, not only in the way she spoke of her own but in the way she treated his.

When she found out about him, whether he told her or Jeff told her or Victor or Laura let something slip, she wouldn’t be able to leave. She could move out now, divorce him if they were married, but she’d never break up a family. He, like his father, knew this to his very bones.

The phone rang again in the outer office.

“You gonna get that?” Victor asked, getting up from his chair.

“I’ve work to do, I want to be home early tonight.”

“Don’t blame you,” Victor muttered, lifted his hand casually in farewell and left.

Nate went to work.

He had no idea his life, for the second time in as many weeks, was about to be rocked to its very foundations.

Nate did get home early. He’d been meaning to tell Lily they were moving and had never gotten around to it. They always had much better things to do.

The movers would be there the next day to start packing and would be moving them the day after that. He wanted to talk to Lily about having them move whatever she needed from her house in Somerset.

However, he arrived home to an empty flat.

He hadn’t called her to tell her he was coming home early and expected she’d gone out somewhere. She was nearly obsessed with the idea of finding a job. Or she could be with Laura.

He picked up the phone and dialled his mother.

“Nathaniel, my dearest, I’m so glad you called. Would you and Lily like to come over for dinner next week?”

Nate was walking into the bedroom to change clothes and he stopped.

Then he froze.

“Nathaniel?” Laura called when he didn’t respond.

“Sorry, Laura, I’ll ring you back,” Nate murmured.

He pressed the button without listening to her good-bye and stared around the room.

Lily’s cosmetics were not messily piled on the bureau. He could smell her perfume but the bottle was gone.

He walked to the bathroom.

Her toothbrush and all the other bottles and jars (and Nate had noted there were a great number of them, the sight of this, he found to his surprise, made him feel an unusual sense of contentment), were gone.

He went back to the bedroom and pulled out one of the drawers she’d moved into.

It was empty.

He pulled out another one.

It, too, was empty.

He walked back into the living room and saw some mail on a table. She’d had another mess of post forwarded from her friend Maxine. It was all still there opened but left.

Nate noticed her mortgage was overdue as were two credit cards. Nate found this surprising and wondered, vaguely, why she hadn’t given them to him. He’d told her he’d take care of it, take care of everything. There was absolutely no reason her bills should be overdue.

There was also a letter written in a neat slightly creative handwriting. Her mother, telling Lily of the “latest antics” of Fazire and her excitement at their imminent holiday to Hawaii.

He got himself a drink and sat on the couch and waited.

After darkness had fallen, he smoked and drank more, a good deal more. He hadn’t had a cigarette since that night outside the front door of his parent’s home. Hadn’t even wanted one but he wanted one then.

She didn’t come home. She didn’t call.

Not that night, not the next.

The movers moved him and, on that day, he went to the address on her mortgage bill.

The town where she lived was smart and he could tell it was expensive by the number of BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars parked in the drives.

Her house was right on the seafront, he could see from its position that there was a view of the Victorian pier from the back windows. He noted with detachment that it was a very fine piece of real estate, an excellent location. It was a terraced house, three stories at street level but likely another one set in the cliff. It was a lot of house for just Lily. It was also rather stately even if it looked from the outside a bit run down. She’d planted two enormous terracotta planters with a wealth of flowers and they sat on either side of the front door.

He knocked, looking to his left into a sun room that sat at the front of the house. It had mosaic tiled floors and wicker furniture in it with gaily printed cushions inviting you to sit. He was not in the mood to notice the furniture was not new and rather battered. He was not in the mood because no one answered. The house looked deserted.

Then he heard, “Are you looking for Lily?”

A neighbour had come out to walk her dog and Nate turned to the old lady. “Yes, is she here?”

“Nope, moved, moved back home I heard. Just up and left, gone back to America. Surprised me, she seemed a solid sort of girl. But there you go. You never know people.”

She kept walking her little dog and Nate watched her move down the small street Lily’s house was on. He watched her hit the wider pavement that edged the larger road that was the turn off to Lily’s street. He watched her as she disappeared down the steep hill toward the pier.

Then he got in his car and drove back to London.

Three days after Lily left, Nate moved into his new apartment, the same day he disconnected his old phone. His secretary took a leave of absence due to an unexpected extended illness.

His temporary secretary had never heard of Lily Jacobs. When she took the calls from the woman, she lost most of the messages under a pile of ones marked urgent (nearly all calls to Nate McAllister seemed to be urgent and the secretary simply couldn’t cope). She lost a lot of messages in the two weeks Nate put up with her, none of them nearly as urgent as the ones from Lily.

The ones Nate’s temp didn’t lose, Jeff stole.

Danielle was awash with delight at the strange abrupt exit of Lily. So much so, weeks later, she made her last, desperate attempt at capturing his heart by seducing his body. He’d been so revolted and he’d told her, in more words than he would normally use, exactly what he thought of her. Unbeknownst to him, five minutes after he pulled his Maserati out from in front of his parent’s house after this somewhat dramatic scene, Lily had walked up the stoop for the last time with her beloved Fazire. It was very unfortunate timing as, at that moment Lily was the last person on earth Danielle Roberts wanted to see. And anyway, Danielle and her brother had prepared well for this moment.

Victor and Laura were, at first, confused then worried then they both became angry at Lily’s unexplained departure. Surprisingly, for the first time in Nate’s life, he saw Laura’s anger turn to rage and it didn’t blow itself out in a matter of minutes. She seemed to nurse it for days, weeks, even, if Lily’s name ever came up in conversation (usually by Jeff), years.

Jeff was also quite happy and very smug about Lily’s departure. He knew something; Nate understood this by the way Jeff acted. At first he was cagey and jumpy as if he expected whatever he did to backfire which happened often with Jeff. But when it didn’t the smugness was complete and it, too, lasted for years.

Nate knew that Jeff told Lily about his past life, how his relationship started with Jeff’s father and she ran. She had told him that nothing Jeff could say would change how she felt about him but she had lied.

Nate was well acquainted with people who lied. This didn’t surprise him one bit. A glorious, twenty-two year old virgin from Indiana who probably lived in a palatial home that looked like a plantation (at least, this is where Nate saw her in his mind whenever he thought about her, which was a great deal for the first few months but later, as a well-honed defence mechanism, not at all, or at least, not during daylight hours) and had been cosseted and sheltered all her life, confronted with what Nate was…

She was probably still showering to wash away the filth of him.

The day Lily Jacobs found out her parents died was the day the Nate McAllister that she’d breathed new life into died.

He found new women, none of them a single thing like Lily. His father became Chairman of the Board while Nate took over as CEO. He bought an enormous penthouse apartment and commissioned an even bigger bed.

And he slept in it, in the rare times he slept at home, alone (or, at least, most of the time).