LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      And with Denver incarcerated, she’d simply waltzed out of Jax’s life without a backward glance.

      The mother he’d trusted, the mother he’d loved, gone, just like that.

      Now, ten years later, Denver had drummed up another appeal and he wouldn’t be surprised if Jackie came back.

      Not only had Jax’s love for his mother taken a serious hit, but he’d lost respect for her too. How could he not, when she buzzed around his charismatic father no matter what he did, yet didn’t give a stuff about her only child and had severed contact with him for a decade?

      He’d dealt with her treachery years ago and had finally moved on, but it galled him that Denver had once again raised his ugly head at a time when Jax was finally on top.

      Maroney Mine had flourished and he thanked a nebulous god every day his maternal grandmother had put the mine in his name the moment he hit twenty-five.

      Wily Gran had hated her daughter’s penchant for ‘scrubbed-up bad boys’ and rather than leave Jackie everything in her will she’d distributed her assets.

      He’d been striving to make a success of the mine ever since, no thanks to the adverse publicity from Denver’s trial and criminal ties, and his father’s constant quest to make headlines. Regular magazine interviews, rumours of ring-leading gambling syndicates within jail and a tell-all biography had ensured the Maroney name remained front and centre in the media—for all the wrong reasons.

      Little wonder the journos were hounding him for a different angle on the sordid tale.

      As he’d told them repeatedly, he had nothing to say on the subject of his father. Not one single word.

      Jax’s hands clenched at the last memory he had of his dad before he’d been arrested. Denver had shouted him lunch at the swankiest hotel in Melbourne. They’d lingered over Tasmanian oysters and King Island filet mignon with the most expensive Cab Sav in the house accentuating the meal perfectly.

      No one could tell a story like his dad and he’d laughed long and hard over Denver’s exaggerated tales, their closeness something he valued the older he got.

      Not many guys he knew in their mid-twenties were still happy to hang out with their dads but Denver had always included him in everything.

      Not quite.

      Denver had been arrested the next day in a Victorian Police Force special operation targeting corporate crime.

      And Jax had been shattered.

      The father he’d idolised, the father he’d looked up to, the father he’d admired for working his way up from his blue collar roots—and his own deadbeat dad—to become a business dynamo, was a liar and a thief and not the man Jax thought he was.

      He’d stood by Denver: through the trial, the adverse publicity, the sentencing.

      Initially he’d done it out of loyalty but as the trial progressed and the extent of Denver’s treachery became apparent, he did it so he could imprint every last detail into his memory as a reminder to never be duped again.

      By anyone.

      Denver’s non-contact after his incarceration had been a bonus. He wouldn’t have responded if the old man had tried to contact him anyway.

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