30DaystoSyn (19 page)

“Your mother?”

He nodded. “Olivia Henare. The only thing
she ever gave me was a name but she did that so I’d never forget how I was
conceived.”

“Did you know who your father was?” she
asked.

“That day on the beach he told her his name
was Shane, not Sean. No last name, just Shane. She had no idea where he lived,
which university he attended. She knew nothing at all about him so she couldn’t
tell her parents who’d ruined her. She couldn’t get in touch with him. She was
literally screwed.”

“So you weren’t Syn McGregor back then.”

“No, Syn Henare,” he replied. “I didn’t
find out about Sean until I was nineteen and he came to visit me in prison.”

The things he was telling her broke her
heart.

The abuse at the hands of his mother. The
neglect. Growing up among prostitutes and drug addicts and thieves. Fearing the
beatings. Fearing the drunken men who shoved himself aside or hit him.

Hot gorge rose in her throat when he told
her he had begun turning tricks when he was not much older than his mother had
been when she gave birth to him. Becoming a male whore had been the only way he
had to pay the madam back for his room and board.

His words came back to taunt her:
“Who I
am. What I am. What I was.”

She could not look at him as he told of her
how the madam of the brothel had been his first. Of how she and the other women
taught him a trade—albeit it an illegal and immoral one—and how he had made
more money from servicing the madam’s female clients than the women made at the
hands of the johns.

“I was a very popular tourist attraction at
Rose’s Emporium,” he said bitterly.

“Did you… Were all your clients…” She
didn’t know how to ask him such an embarrassing question.

“They were all women,” he said. “I’d have
done my damnedest to emasculate any man who tried to put his hands on me in
that way.”

She shivered but it wasn’t from the cold
wind that had suddenly picked up but rather from the thought of him doing
violence in that particular way.

“It’s getting cold out here,” he said.
“Let’s go back to the car.”

He took her hand as they walked—saying
nothing, his shoulders hunched defensively in the lightweight denim jacket he’d
taken from the backseat of the car when they left the fish place.

She kept his silence until they were seated
in the car and he laid his head along the back of his seat. She realized he had
closed his eyes.

“I think you’ve told me enough for one
night,” she said softly.

“No,” he said, opening his eyes to stare at
the headliner. “If I don’t tell you all of it now, I might never will.”

“There is an old country music song about a
teenage boy who is taken in by a woman who runs a brothel,” he said. “I sorta
thought of that as my theme song.” He swiveled his head on the headrest to look
at her. “Even the woman’s name in the song was the same as the woman who taught
me how to be a man.”

She was turned in the seat facing him and
he wished she’d reach over to take his hand where it lay on his thigh but she
didn’t. She was giving him time, distance, and whatever else she thought he
might need.

“I went to school during the day and was
schooled at night,” he laughed. “What more could a teenage boy with raging
hormones want?”

“You didn’t mind…ah…servicing those women?”
she asked.

“Repeat,” he said. “Teenage boy with raging
hormones. I never had to pull my own… You know.”

“Gotcha,” she said with a little smile.

He looked away from her beautiful face to
stare out the windscreen. “It wasn’t bad. Rose let me have some time to myself
to hang out with Jono and Craigie. They were my best mates. I’ve known them all
my life. Jono’s mother was Rose’s maid and Craigie’s father was one of her best
clients.”

“So they knew what you did at night,” she
said.

“They knew and they thought it was cool.”

“But you didn’t,” she said softly.

“I knew it was wrong,” he said. “I felt
dirty. Especially so because I enjoyed the hell out of it.”

He wrapped his hands around the steering
wheel and pulled a couple of times, gathering his thoughts and the courage to
tell her the rest. He took a deep breath, held it, and then slowly let it out.

“My mother never spoke to me. If she passed
me in the hall or on the stairs, she never looked at me. As far as she was
concerned I didn’t exist. All that changed the morning Rose had a massive heart
attack and died on the floor of her office. She left the business to my mother
who took it over with an iron hand.” He glanced at her. “The other women disliked
Olivia. Some of them left right after Rose’s funeral. I guess those who stayed
felt they had nowhere else to go and were willing to put up with Olivia’s
shit.”

“Things got worse for you,” she stated.

“That’s an understatement,” he said. “The
morning after the funeral she had one of the women come get me. I was on my way
to school and was annoyed because I was already running late. It didn’t matter.
Olivia told me from that day forward I wouldn’t be going to school anymore. She
said she had booked two clients for me for that morning.”

He was quiet so long after that admission
that it obviously concerned her. She held her hand out to him and he took it.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I went up to my room, packed a bag and
thought I’d go live with Jono,” he said. “At the funeral his mother had offered
to let me stay with them if things got bad. I guess she and the other women
knew they would.” He shrugged. “And they did.”

She knew he was about to tell her something
horrific for he had begun to tremble. As much as she wanted to beg him to stop,
not to reveal whatever awfulness had happened, she knew he needed to tell her.
She knew he’d never told another living soul what he was about to tell her. She
tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and held onto his hand as he laid his
past bare to her.

The clients his mother had booked for him
had been men. Two burly stevedores who had shown up in the doorway of his room
to block his leaving. Terrified by the look in the men’s eyes, horrified by
what he knew they had come there to do to him, he had turned and sprinted
across the room, plunging headfirst through the screen of his window and
plummeting ten feet to the ground below.

“I dislocated my shoulder,” he said.
“Knocked myself out in the bargain. When I came to, I was lying on the dining
room table with Doc Merrill about to pull my arm back into place.”

“They didn’t take you to the hospital?” she
asked.

“Hell no. I had some scrapes and cuts on my
face and hands but other than the shoulder, he thought I was fine,” he said.
“Doc took care of the women when they got STDs or slipped up and got one up the
duff.” His lips twisted. “Got pregnant. He’d lost his license to practice but
he was still a good doc.”

“You could have had a concussion.”

“I probably did but I guess they figured I
had a hard enough head that it didn’t matter.”

Anger bubbled up inside her. “So he just
pulled your arm back into place.”

He nodded. “Those same two men were
standing there. One held my legs and the other kept my chest and good arm
pinned to the tabletop as Doc yanked on it. I screamed loud enough to wake the
dead.” A muscle flared in his cheek. “I remember hearing Olivia laughing and
saying if I thought that pain was bad I hadn’t felt anything yet.”

“She turned you over to those men,” she
said, feeling tears prickling behind her eyes.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t what she meant.
While they held me down, she unzipped my pants, pulled them down then grabbed
hold of my balls. She pushed them back up into my abdomen and held them there
until I passed out. That was her way of punishing me for having tried to run
away.”

Once more something he’d said flitted
through her mind:
“You wouldn’t be the first woman to do that to me. Been
there, endured that. Hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Oh, Kiwi,” she whispered.

“She locked me in the basement without food
and water for two days. She wanted me weak and at the mercy of those bastards
when they came back. She was…” He drew finger quotes in the air. “Teaching me a
lesson. Jono’s mother helped me to escape. I went to Jono’s house. Craigie was
there. We waited until later that night then came back with cans of petrol.
Jono and Craigie poured it around the outside of the house while I took a can
into her office, poured the contents around the room.”

“Oh my God!” she gasped. “You set fire to
the house?”

“Burned it to the fucking ground,” he said
with satisfaction.

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“No,” he said. “Jono threw a match on the
gas at the back of the house then we started yelling fire. I made sure they all
got out safely before I broke the window of her office and tossed in a match.
It went up quickly after that.”

He told her how they’d been arrested down
at the docks trying to sneak aboard a freighter bound for America. How his
mother had pressed charges and they’d all been sentenced to ten years in prison
for arson.

“I was two years into my sentence when my
father showed up with a high-priced lawyer in tow.”

“He knew about you?”

“He’d known about me from the beginning,”
he said. “Apparently he’d seen my mother somewhere when she was pregnant and
thought it might be his. He kept tabs on her and when I was arrested, he made
sure there were DNA samples taken.”

“Why did he wait so long to contact you
then?”

“He wanted to see what I would do in there.
Would I become like the rest of the inmates or would I try to be my own man. I
finished school, got my diploma. It took me two years to graduate. I think
that’s what he had been waiting for plus there was another reason he decided to
help me.”

She was almost afraid to ask. “Which was?”

“He had been diagnosed with amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis—ALS—and they’d given him three to five years.”

“I know that’s also called Lou Gehrig’s
disease but I don’t really know what it is,” she told him.

“They don’t know what causes it,” he said.
“It is a progressive neuromuscular disease that affects and weakens motor
neurons. Down Under we call it Motor Neurone Disease. People diagnosed with it
lose the ability to move their limbs and the muscles needed to move, eat, speak
and breathe.”

“So he wanted to get to know you before he
died,” she suggested.

“It was a bit more complicated than that.
He’d never married—had never wanted to—and I was his only heir,” he told her.
“His parents were dead and he’d been an only child so there was no one to leave
MI to. He’d worked too hard to have the vultures pick it apart when he carked
it. He offered it to me on one condition.”

She was looking at him in a way that said
she was waiting for the next god-awful thing to come out of his mouth.

“He said he would get my sentence vacated
and pay my way through university in the States if I would swear not to go back
to my criminal ways.” He snorted. “Like I’d had a choice in how I’d been
raised.”

“Obviously you agreed,” she said.

He nodded. “He said he would pay all my
expenses if I got my MBA and graduated with good marks, he would hand the
company over to me—strictly overseen by the board of directors. It didn’t take
me long to agree but I had four conditions of my own.”

“You wanted Jonny and Craig released too,”
she said.

He smiled at her. “I knew that would be
your first thought.”

“They are your best friends,” she said.
“You feel responsible for them.”

“I do and I was adamant about it. At first
he refused but when he realized I would rather stay in prison than leave Jono
and Craigie there, he capitulated. I even think he admired me just a little bit
for my loyalty to my mates.”

“I’m sure it was more than just a little
bit, Kiwi,” she said, smiling.

“So he agreed and we were released. I
expect a lot of money changed hands but I didn’t care. We were out and on our
way to the States in less than two weeks.”

“We?” she questioned.

“My second condition was he had to pay for
Jono and Craigie’s education too. They are both a few years older than me so
they’d already graduated before all the shit hit the fan. Jono went for his
degree in business same as me. He’s my director of marketing at MI.”

“I suspected he was more than a chauffeur
for you,” she said with a laugh.

“And Craigie—who’d always wanted to be a
doctor but would never have had the chance had it not been for my old man—began
taking classes to get his M.D.”

“Jake?”

“Astute woman.” He shrugged. “Once I took
over after graduation I paid his full ride knowing one of the three of us was
most likely gonna need his services one day.”

“What was the third and fourth condition
you gave him?”

“That he had to provide us—rent and utility
free—a place of our own to live. Living in a dorm would have been almost like
prison and being three Kiwis in a white-bread world would have been culture shock.
The fourth was that he find us jobs where we could make some spending money.”

“Did he?”

“No. He said if he was going to be paying
for our education he wanted us to concentrate on our studies and not have to
worry about working. He gave us a small weekly allowance and bought our
groceries and meal cards for us.”

“Wow,” she exclaimed.

“He did right by us,” he said. “I’ll give
him that.”

“Was he pleased when you graduated?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “He died my
junior year so he never knew I graduated with honors.”

“At the top of your class,” she said.

He shrugged again. “If you’re gonna go for
it, you might as well go for the full Monty.” He reached down to turn on the
car.