Ruined (Family Untied Book 1) Read online

  Ruined

  Family Untied #1

  S.A. McEwen

  Kaleido Text Media

  RUINED

  Published by Kaleido Text Media

  First published in Australia 2020

  Copyright © S.A. McEwen 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 9780648201380 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780648201373 (ebook)

  Editor: Erica Russikoff, Erica’s Editing Services

  Cover image: iStock

  Cover Design: Rough—Draft @rghdrftstudio

  Disclaimer

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are a product of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  45. Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  50. Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  54. Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  57. Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977

  Chapter 58

  59. Upeksha – Linfield, 2018

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  62. Upeksha – Linfield, 2018

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  Book #2 Coming Soon

  Exclusive free novel for my subscribers

  Note from the author

  Bonus chapter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Stephanie.

  Fierce, brave, extraordinary.

  Prologue

  Monday, March 26, 2018

  The woman is well dressed, and the man is dead.

  Her thousand-dollar Louboutins click on the marble floor as she makes her way out of the hotel room to the lift. She’s unhurried; there’s no one else on this floor, and the man made his own bed, so to speak. She has no qualms about leaving him lying in it.

  In the lushly appointed bedroom, there’s evidence of numerous lovers. Discarded high-quality bras and tiny g-strings in delicate lace, in varying sizes. Condom wrappers, champagne glasses, tousled bed sheets, and plenty of damp towels. It looks like an overindulgent orgy, starring the entitled git who’s lying motionless on the lounge room floor.

  White powder is carelessly cut on the glass coffee tabletop beside him. Bottles of champagne are half empty and going flat in various locations throughout the hotel room. The strong smell indicates at least some of it has been spilled sloppily on the luxurious carpet.

  A silk tie hangs casually over a dining chair.

  In the foyer, the woman glances without interest at the front desk, the security cameras, and the few people sitting in the hushed, plush interior. She walks out the three-metre revolving doors at the front of the building.

  A few minutes later, she slips into a taxi. She pulls her long, black hair into a ponytail conspicuously, and looks the middle-aged driver in the eye.

  She asks to be dropped off at a fancy café that she’s never visited before, and pays with cash.

  She doesn’t give another thought to the dead man in the hotel room in Sydney’s wealthy north shore. Rather, she enjoys her coffee, eggs, and smashed avocado without haste and without worry.

  Then she goes home and gets on with her day.

  1

  Five Months Earlier – November 2017

  Natalie cursorily flicks through yesterday’s mail, then dumps it on her kitchen bench.

  The marble bench top gleams brightly. Morning sun streams in the large window overlooking the empty street. The small lounge area is neat and clean.

  Natalie feels a pang of guilt, which she quickly pushes aside, as she does every fortnight after the cleaner has been to her apartment.

  The cleaner is the one luxury she affords herself. Three hours once a fortnight. She tidies, vacuums, and mops—all tasks that Natalie is perfectly capable of doing herself. Her apartment isn’t even very big. She doubts it takes Mali three hours to clean it, but she hates the power imbalance between them. She hates another woman cleaning up after her. She pays her far more than the going rate to assuage her feelings on the matter.

  Mostly, Natalie hates that she can still hear her mother’s voice on the topic, even though she’s never confessed to her mother that she has a cleaner—and even though she is thirty-eight years old, and it’s frankly none of her mother’s business. But frugality was drummed into her from a very early age. If you were to look in the third drawer under her gleaming marble bench top, you’d find neatly folded pieces of baking paper and aluminium foil, the faint outlines of biscuits or scones visible on them. Natalie can easily use them ten to fifteen times before needing to tear off a clean piece.

  In her savings account, you’d find enough to comfortably pay a deposit on a second house in Sydney’s north shores.

  No one opens those drawers, though, or looks in her savings account.

  Natalie has lived alone for seventeen years. As soon as she finished her law degree, she fled the family home, the relief washing over her from the moment she was handed keys to her very own space.

  That same relief floods through her every time she arrives back at her apartment after a family lunch, every second Sunday.

  Now, however, she’s still a week away from seeing her family, and she pushes them out of her mind.

  She kicks off her heels and runs her fingers through her sweaty hair, collapsing on the couch, tilting her head back and closing her eyes.

  Her thoughts drift back to the problem.

  The tiny, minute, yet very large problem growing inside her.

  “You were at the gallery last night.”

  Natalie had startled.

  Her Uber had had a minor prang. While the driver had inspected the damage, taken photos, and exchanged numbers and license details with the other driver, Natalie had stood on the pavement, the sunshine beckoning to her like a magnet. She was soaking it up, her black hair getting hot under its rays, debating whether to walk the rest of the way home to fully enjoy it, when a man had exited the other car. He had waved dismissively at the driver, his
phone glued to his ear, indicating his watch and that he’d walk the rest of the way.

  Then he’d seen Natalie and had stopped dead.

  She was dressed for work, her makeup flawless, her fitted red dress showing off every curve. Its neckline was perfection—classy, but showing just enough soft, tantalising flesh that men always thought of sex. A simple choker of pearls stood out around her neck.

  Her appointment had cancelled and she was heading home, the effort wasted.

  At least, wasted until this man was left staring at her, speechless.

  Natalie had cocked her head at him, watching. She had wished she had a cigarette—inexplicably, she felt like blowing a waft of smoke toward him. Not in his face. Just in his general direction. A challenge, maybe. A statement of independence, like she was a teenager playing truant from school, and what was he going to do about it?

  It was such a clichéd moment. Hot man in suit notices sexy woman in dress.

  Hot man stops and stares.

  Except, in Natalie’s line of work, this represented an opportunity rather than an inconvenience or an intrusion.

  She wondered if the morning might not be wasted after all.

  But then he had surprised her with the comment about the gallery.

  He’d unceremoniously ended his call mid-sentence, as though the call was of no consequence whatsoever.

  No consequence compared to her.

  He fastened his dark eyes on her, and something inside her chest leapt erratically. Flashing danger signs glinted in his black eyes. For once, Natalie felt like the prey rather than the lioness.

  He had stopped right in front of her, his broad shoulders and narrow hips clearly defined under his well-cut shirt. Not taking his eyes off her, he held out his hand. “Griffin,” he said.

  Natalie had taken his hand on automatic pilot. She felt mesmerised by his eyes. They were so dark. Framed with long, black lashes and beautiful pale skin, he looked half playboy, half wolf.

  She shook his hand for a while before his half-raised eyebrow reminded her to speak. For some reason, she told him: “Ivy.”

  He kept hold of her hand. Emboldened by the effect he was obviously having on her, he kept it firmly in his, his thumb lightly running over her skin, his stare intense. He was thoroughly at ease in his own skin.

  “You were staring at Jack Charles like you might somehow morph into him. You looked ethereal,” he told her.

  And somehow, all her rules had been broken.

  Partly it might have been because you got the sense that people didn’t say no to Griffin. Or maybe it was because he had noticed her at the art gallery—really noticed her. Not her curves, or her cheekbones, or her bewitching eyes. But her very being, in that moment, with that picture. Which had spoken to her in ways that squeezed her heart, and bruised it.

  So she didn’t quote him her rates. She didn’t ask how long he’d like. She didn’t play it for the cash. She let him take her to a hotel, and undress her, and command her, and marvel at her. She let him go down on her until she came. Really came, in the unhurried way that you can when there’s no clock ticking, and the man between your legs acts like there’s no place in the world he’d rather be.

  She never had casual sex.

  She never let herself get lost in the moment.

  She never spoke to someone in the bedroom freely—unedited, unmasked.

  She rarely spoke to anyone freely at all.

  But Griffin was so intense, so attractive, so enamoured by every inch of her, and had such presence, that she’d forgotten all the rules.

  And now she was fucking pregnant. After twenty years of sexual activity so careful and pragmatic she hadn’t had so much as a single itch that made her wonder if she needed an extra check up—one moment of unthinking passion, of using someone else’s condom (God, it must have broken. How old had it been? She had never had a breakage, in all her years of considerable sexual activity), and all of that was out the window.

  Then again, she doubted Griffin ever waited very long between conquests. It felt almost like a sign.

  Despite this, she knew what needed to be done. She was not in any place to be a mother, even if she wanted children.

  Which she didn’t.

  But somehow, Jack Charles’s beautiful face, his story, Griffin’s white-hot, insatiable desire, and her reasons for not wanting children were all tied up in a messy great ball that Natalie was in no mood to try to untangle.

  She’s interrupted by her mobile ringing, anyway.

  “Can you come by a bit early on Sunday, Natalie?” Upeksha asks when Natalie answers the phone.

  Natalie is used to the lack of preamble and pleasantries. It suits her well to get straight to the point.

  For a while she had tried ignoring her mother’s calls between Sunday lunches, feeling that the fortnightly interaction was quite enough family time. That only lasted until Upeksha sent a police car around to her apartment for a welfare check. The officer had peered around Natalie’s door curiously.

  “Your mother says you haven’t answered the phone for two days.” He left the statement hanging there.

  Natalie had shrugged helplessly. “She fled civil war. She’s always assuming the worst.”

  For some reason, when someone else raised their eyebrows judgementally at her mother’s behaviour—no matter how objectively crazy it might seem—Natalie’s first impulse was violence. When it was just Natalie, deliberately letting the twelfth call go through to voicemail, her irritation and incredulity were unmatched by anyone. But the officer’s slight sneer down his nose at her, his look of disbelief at the sparkling wedge of home he could see behind her, made her dig her fingernails into her palms so hard the resulting little half-moon indents in her skin could be seen for the next half an hour.

  It was more than a desire to protect Upeksha. It was like a reverse mother’s instinct, exacerbated; like a rabid dog. Natalie might be allowed to think Upeksha was completely bonkers. But this twenty-something white guy—who knew nothing of war and survival and assimilation—was most certainly not.

  “Mmm,” she answers her mother now, noncommittal. “What’s up?”

  “Your father has decided that you do so well on the stock market, that he’d like a lesson. We have some savings he’d like to trade with.”

  Inwardly, Natalie groans.

  Her father will never trade a dollar on the stock market. Once she has shown him, in detail, how it works, he will at first think he is missing something. When it finally dawns on him the amount of risk involved, he will change his mind quick smart.

  But it’s no good trying to explain that to him; it’s not fathomable to him that Natalie would risk her money in that way. If learning to trade is going to baffle him, learning how reckless his only daughter is with her money will baffle him even more.

  Natalie agrees to help, though. Before Sunday rolls around, she’ll have to come up with a way to avoid that particular lesson. Not least because she hasn’t traded on the stock market for a good eight years.

  Ironically, after getting her first big break from her first bad trade, she had bought her modest apartment in Sydney’s middle-class South Coogee, and then had no cash left to trade with.

  The lucky stock was one of her earliest purchases, before she had really learnt what she was doing. It immediately started heading downhill, and she had stubbornly refused to sell it at her stop loss, the idea of losing three-thousand dollars intolerable to her bank balance and her ego. Within a week it was at a quarter of its value. Fifteen-thousand dollars down, Natalie had never not honoured a stop loss again.

  But it was worth so little by then that she had forgotten about it for three years. Initially, she checked it hopefully every day, and it continued to bounce between two and four cents, a sad little line on her charts that was a painful reminder of her mistake. Her ego.

  But then, routinely forgotten, her twenty-grand investment was “suddenly” worth three-hundred-thousand dollars, and Natalie was rich, b
y most people’s standards.

  Except it wasn’t an investment. Natalie exclusively traded short-term, keeping stocks for less than thirty days, taking advantage of small fluctuations in the market, making only a few hundred dollars on every trade. But her three-year “mistake stock” had earned her the most money she had ever made in her entire life.

  It was hard to keep remembering it was a mistake after that.

  Natalie imagines her father’s face. They’d sit down at the computer, his spectacles pushed to the rim of his nose, his legal pad and pen at the ready, a calculator by his elbow. He would expect Natalie to go through the process, and he’d take notes meticulously, expecting to be able to follow an A, B, C in a neat linear fashion—from the lesson to steady income once they had finished.

  Ravi approached everything in life with due diligence. He combated whatever he had endured in Sri Lanka with order, patience, and as much Englishness as he could muster. Both her parents already spoke perfect English when they arrived in Australia—Ceylon being a British colony before regaining independence. But they had bought land in the whitest suburb in Sydney that they could afford. They had given their children the most Australian names they could come by. And they considered themselves as white as the next person.