Chapter 243 Dumped Unceremoniously

Chapter 243 Dumped Unceremoniously
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-One

Nathan glanced back at his driver, who moved back to the car and stood beside it with the careful non-presence of someone who was maintaining proximity without intruding.

He looked at Clara, his face holding curiousity mixed with contempt at what the situation held for him.

“Talk,” he ordered, tucking his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers.

Clara straightened her coat, then stared at Nathan directly.

“Aria Beaumont,” she said simply.

His expression did not change significantly.

But something behind it shifted, the very small shift of a person who has been actively thinking about a name and has just heard someone else say it.

“What about her?,” he asked, his tone careful 

“She is taking everything,” Clara said. “The Beaumont Empire. The Vaughn Empire. The Graves family’s favour. The public’s attention.” She paused. “And you are standing here watching it happen.”

“Mrs Beaumont—”

“She has been winning,” Clara said, and there was a heat in her voice that she was not controlling very hard, “on every front. For months. She has walked into this city and taken everything that should not have been hers to take, and the people around her who should be doing something about it are doing nothing.” She paused. “I know that you are not happy about it.”

Nathan looked at her, his teeth gritted.

“I know,” she said, “that you have your own reasons for not wanting to see Aria Beaumont continue as she is continuing. I know that the Graves family’s current configuration is not one that serves your interests.” She paused again. “I am not here to ask you for favours. I am here to suggest that we have a common problem.”

The garage was very quiet around them.

Nathan’s expression was doing the careful, contained work of a man who was listening to something he was interested in while maintaining the plausible position of a man who had not decided to be interested.

She pressed forward.

“She is sitting in the Vaughn Empire building right now,” Clara said. “She has the Beaumont board behind her. She has Lucian Graves beside her. She has the public’s absolute adoration because of the arrest and the Vaughn story and the comments and the awards and the interviews.” She stopped. “She is going to be untouchable within six months if nothing is done.”

Nathan was very still.

She could see it in him.

The specific stillness of a man who had been building pressure for weeks and had not found a release for it, who had been watching the same coverage she had been watching and had been feeling the same thing she was feeling, which was the corrosive combination of powerlessness and fury.

She had found the right point of entry.

She knew it from the quality of his stillness.

“She has been climbing for eighteen months,” she said, more quietly now, with the specific gentleness of someone who was pressing exactly where she needed to press, “and she has never once looked back to see who she was climbing over. Are you going to sit here and let her take everything away from everyone who should be ahead of her?”

Nathan listened to this, then he looked at her.

Clara stood back, a small smirk of triumph in her face. She knew she must have touched a nerve somewhere in Nathan. Surely, with everything she’d said, he was not going to just stand back and let Aria continue plowing everything to the ground.

He looked at her for a long moment with the flat, assessing gaze of a man who was looking at a tool and deciding whether it was useful.

Then he said, “Get out of my garage, Mrs Beaumont.”

The warmth that had been in his voice for the past two minutes was gone.

Clara blinked, clearly not expecting that.

“I’m not interested,” he said, and his voice was cold now and flat and entirely without the quality of consideration it had contained a moment ago. “In whatever you’re proposing. In whatever arrangement you think we’re going to come to in a parking ramp.” He looked at her with the specific disdain of a man who had just decided someone was not worth his time. “Whatever your problem with Aria Beaumont is, sort it yourself. I have my own concerns and I don’t need a screaming woman from a family court scandal as a partner in them.”

Clara’s face changed, her smile draining fast.

“How dare you—”

“Peter,” Nathan uttered, calling to his driver and ignoring Clara.

“Yes sir,” The driver moved towards them.

Clara planted her feet.

“You are making a mistake,” she said. “You need someone on your side who—”

“I need you out of this building,” Nathan said, flatly.

She was taken by the arm, which she resisted, and the resistance was ineffective, because the driver was massive. 

She alone could not take him on and this soon became very clear.

As she was dragged out, the words that came out of her as she was moved was not dignified, but she was moved anyway.

Towards the garage exit and up the ramp and onto the street, where she was dumped unceremoniously.

The last thing she saw before the garage closed behind her was Nathan getting back into his car with the expression of a man who had already filed the encounter under irrelevant and moved on.

Clara stood on the pavement.

She was breathing hard.

Several pedestrians moved around her with the specific indifference of city people who had learned not to engage with whatever was happening on the pavement.

She straightened her coat.

She was not finished.

But she was finished here.

She walked back to her car with as much composure as she could assemble, which was not very much.

Quietly, she nursed her anger as she got into her car, driving all the way home with black fury in her heart.

Nathan Graves will regret this day.

And she will watch with satisfaction as he comes back to ask her for help.