He picked up the letter with the cheque attached and studied it anew.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said to the empty room.
He hadn’t expected Irene Palmer to agree to see him so easily, but it seemed that whoever was acting as her assistant these days had no idea he was persona non grata in the exalted Palmer Enterprises building. The looks he’d received on his way up to Irene’s office would have made him laugh out loud had he not been so hell-bent on reaching his destination.
But those looks were nothing compared to the expression on her face when he was shown through to her office.
“Your ten o’clock is here, Mrs Palmer.” The fresh-faced secretary who’d made his appointment showed him directly into her domain.
“My ten…” Irene rose from her chair. “You! Call security, Anna. This man should not be here.”
“I think you’ll find you do want to see me, Irene.”
Josh slid the typewritten letter and cheque from his pocket and opened it out on the desk in front of her. He could almost have felt sorry for her as the colour drained from her face and she slumped back into her chair.
“Mrs Palmer? Do you still want me to call security?”
The younger woman sounded scared. Josh was prepared to lay money on the fact that probably no one had ever seen Irene Palmer at a disadvantage before.
“No, not any more,” Irene rasped through lips that had turned slightly blue around the edges. “Please close the door on your way out.”
As soon as the door shut behind her assistant, Irene appeared to summon courage from somewhere. Josh had to admit to a grudging admiration. Not many people could recover from a shock like the one she’d just received with such aplomb. Even seated she managed to convey that she was looking down her nose at him. That he was nothing more than a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of her heel.
“So you’re her son,” she finally said, almost to herself. “Now it all makes sense.”
Without waiting for her invitation, which he doubted would be forthcoming anyway, he settled his frame in one of the button-back leather chairs that faced her desk. “Just what did you say to my mother to make her leave?”
“What makes you think I said anything?”
“Don’t patronise me, Irene. We both know it wasn’t Bruce who sent her away. That’s your signature on that cheque.”
Irene seemed to shrivel a little under his stare.
“It was pathetically easy, you know. Mind you, so was she.”
Josh clenched his jaw against the fury her deliberate insult roused inside him. He took strength in the secure knowledge that her words were a lie. His mother had never been easy. She’d been a devoted mother and she’d been a lady. And if she’d ever craved male companionship after her affair with Bruce, she quelled that craving, putting Josh’s needs ahead of her own every day of his life.
When he didn’t visibly react to her comment, Irene continued.
“Bruce and I had difficulty starting a family. After ten years, we’d all but given up hope—the failure created a distance between us. In many ways it was a relief when he turned to her for comfort, and I was always grateful for his discretion. He knew if a scent of his relationship with her leaked out how destructive it would have been to me. No one else ever knew.
“When I unexpectedly became pregnant I knew I had to fight to keep him and I was determined to win. I hadn’t strived to build all of this,” she gestured across her office with her hand, “with my husband to see it all crumble for the sake of Bruce’s little fling with his secretary.
“I knew my pregnancy gave me the ammunition to get Bruce to give her up, until I noticed something else. Your mother made all her own clothes and it didn’t take an expert eye to see that she’d begun to slowly let the seams out on her dresses, or to recognise the fragility in her face. I stared at the same weakness in myself every morning.”
“So you confronted her.”
“Yes, I confronted her. You think I was going to let her destroy what Bruce and I had created for our own children? Bruce is the type of man who would have stood by her; he would have given her child—you—everything our own boys deserved. There was no way I would allow my children’s birthright to be diluted by her bastard.”
Irene shoved her chair back from her desk and began to pace.
“I knew she couldn’t have told him about her pregnancy yet, or Bruce would have made a move by then to leave me, and I wasn’t about to be upstaged. So I went to see her in that revolting boardinghouse where she lived and told her it was over. That Bruce had confessed his affair to me but that he no longer loved her.”