‘What other guy?’ she asked, finally homing in on his back-up proof for the accusation of blackmail and fraud.
‘He’d read the story about our break-up in the newspapers. Laura Farrell’s part in it. He thought about it for a while, then decided to contact me, said he didn’t want another one of her suckers to suffer as he had, didn’t want her to get away with it again.’ Tony gestured to his lawyer. ‘Show Chloe his statutory declaration.’
The lawyer opened a manila folder and passed her a sheaf of documents. On top was a statutory declaration, made by a John Dennis Flaherty with a Perth address, not anyone she knew or imagined Tony would know since he lived on the other side of Australia. Still, it was entirely possible that newspapers over there had picked up on a juicy celebrity scandal, so that part was credible.
She began reading.
According to John Flaherty, Laura Farrell had been his personal assistant four years ago. She had seductively maneuvred him into a sexual relationship although he loved his wife and had no intention of breaking up his marriage, which he’d made clear to Laura Farrell, who had apparently accepted this situation until she told him she had accidentally fallen pregnant, subsequently pressing him to leave his wife. He refused, ending the affair and offering only to pay support for their child. Laura Farrell went to his wife, begging her to dump him so they could be married. His wife divorced him. He had nothing more to do with Laura Farrell except to pay out a substantial settlement to get her out of his life. A year later he decided he wanted to see his child. He hired a private investigator to track down Laura Farrell. The investigator discovered there was no child and no medical record of there ever being a pregnancy let alone a birth.
Photocopies of the investigator’s reports followed. On being questioned, Laura Farrell had declared the money was a personal gift-‘a kiss-off’-and there was no proof of anything else. It was her word against his-the ex-wife would not testify on his behalf because he had admitted infidelity-so no legal action for fraud could be taken to recover the money.
It was a nasty story, making Chloe’s spine crawl over how Laura had come to her-the wife-forcing the marriage break-up then playing on her sympathy, playing every emotional string she could, making herself out to be Tony’s victim. Chloe wondered if the substantial settlement had been fifty thousand dollars-not a bad take for a bit of pregnancy padding.
‘Laura didn’t suck you in, did she?’ Tony asked anxiously. ‘You didn’t shell out a lot of money to her?’
She slowly raised her gaze from the documents to look directly at him. ‘No. I thought you should. Which is why we’re here.’
His face sagged with relief. ‘At least she didn’t do us that damage.’
It sounded as though he was wiping all fault from himself and Chloe was not about to accept that, eyeing him coldly as she pointed out, ‘You put us in this position, Tony. You gave her the power to play this game.’
‘Do you think I haven’t cursed myself a thousand times for falling into her trap?’ he pleaded.
‘Laura said you seduced her.’
‘Well, she would say that to you, wouldn’t she?’ he scoffed. ‘It served her purpose. Just as it served her purpose to hang out availability signals to me from day one of working for you. Flirtatious looks. Sexy double entendres. The occasional brush past. A whole stack of sly temptations. I laughed it off for months. I didn’t want her.’
Again he leaned forward earnestly, his blue eyes begging her understanding. ‘I had you, Chloe. I didn’t want Laura Farrell. Even when she was doing it to me I told myself I should be stopping her, but I’d had too much to drink at the party and…’ He raked his hands through his hair in an anguished manner. ‘I tell you, Chloe, she’s a female predator. I was coming out of the bathroom. She pushed me back in, had me unzipped in a flash, went down on me and…’
‘Spare me the details!’ Chloe snapped.
‘I’m sorry…sorry…I’m just trying to explain how it was, how I never meant it to happen. I love you,’ he cried emphatically.
Anger flared at the way he was twisting things again. Whether Laura had seduced him or the other way around didn’t really matter because it hadn’t stopped in that bathroom. Her eyes savagely mocked any excuse for his continued infidelity.
‘Don’t tell me this was a once only lapse on your part, Tony. I know it wasn’t.’
‘What did Laura tell you?’ he quickly countered.
Chloe shot down any more lies before he could come up with them. ‘My mother told me. She dismissed the affair as unimportant. The affair, Tony. Not a one-night stand.’
Chloe could see him recalculating, knowing he was under the gun with Stephanie Rollins’s sharp eyes never missing anything. It wouldn’t suit her purpose to plead his cause so he had to give the affair a forgivable twist.
‘All right,’ he conceded with a self-deprecating grimace. ‘Laura knew how to work sex to get to me and it did. Any man would have taken what she was giving out. I’m only human, Chloe. But it made me feel guilty as hell and in the end I did stop it because I cared about our marriage and didn’t want her messing with it.’
She wondered if Max would have taken what Laura could do with sex. Obviously Tony had found it more exciting than what he’d had at home. Was sex more important to men than love? Perhaps the reason why Max had never married was because sex with the one woman got boring after a while, and he preferred to remain free to go after something new and exciting when the urge took him.
Like with her.
A wave of depression rolled through Chloe. She didn’t want to listen to anymore. There was no need to fight for child support on Laura Farrell’s behalf. The business of this meeting was over. She looked bleakly at the man she had married with blind faith in love and spoke what she knew to be the truth.
‘You didn’t want to lose your cash cow, Tony.’
His face flushed an ugly red. ‘Those are Laura’s words, not mine. She was determined on alienating you from me, Chloe, but she’s out of our lives now. No baby for her to hang onto me. That’s all behind us.’ Again his hands reached out in appeal. ‘I’m begging you to forgive me. Give us another chance.’
She shook her head, pushed her chair back and stood up, turning to the two lawyers. ‘Thank you for your services in clarifying the situation with Laura Farrell.’