A Wife For The Billionaire

The air in the consulting room was faintly flavored with antiseptic and fear. Alistair Bannerman sat rigidly straight in a chair too small for his large frame, his fists bunched on his knees. He had survived droughts that cracked the earth to bone, fires that could consume half a cattle station, markets that could potentially ruin all that his father had built. He had faced them head-on, a man unbent by circumstance. But he had never faced this. The doctor’s voice droned on, polished and clinical. Glioblastoma. Aggressive. Six months, a year if we’re lucky. Lucky. The word sat bitter on his tongue. “Treatment?” Alistair asked, his voice even, as if they were discussing cattle yields or rainfall projections. “There are options, Mr Bannerman. They range from radiation to surgery and chemotherapy. But they can only buy you some time. They are not a definite cure.” Time. Not life. Alistair nodded. It was the nod of a man agreeing to terms when he had no intention of bargaining. "Do it, then. Do whatever buys me time." The doctor's commiserating smile washed off him like water from stone. Alistair Bannerman rose, shook hands with a handshake that had once broken horses and ruled an empire, and left the room without once looking back. Outside, the sun seared late in the afternoon over Sydney, gilding the skyline. Alistair stood at the window of his study later that night, looking out not at the glittering harbor but far beyond, to where the outback stretched wild and free. That was his territory, the land his father had left him and he, in turn, had built into legend. Redcliffe Manor. Wild Country. Bannerman land. And it would perish with him if he did nothing. This was all because his sons, his boys and his only true legacy, were shattered. His thoughts turned towards Alex first. Razor-sharp, a tactician who could double a bet before breakfast. A man burned and broken, inwardly and outwardly, by a fire that had nearly taken his life and stolen the girl he loved. Alex had escaped Redcliffe, burying himself in skyscrapers and ledgers, as if urban success could erase the country ghosts. Then there was Troy. His sun-boy. Reckless, magnetic, tethered to the land as deeply as roots to earth. But he was too often ruled by passion, and his loyalty was like a sword that cut both ways. He had stayed at home, with his father, but his staying had turned sour into resentment, his love for the land soured by bitterness for the brother who had left him to bear it alone. Two sons. Two halves of a whole. And not one of them was strong enough, together or alone, to carry Bannerman legacy on. He poured whiskey, the good Tasmanian single malt he reserved for wins and losses. The glass clattered against his teeth when he drank. He'd fought too hard ans buried too much, to have his name scatter on the winds because his boys couldn't find purchase. There had to be a way. His plan had to work. The knock on the door startled him out of his thoughts. Alistair started. “Come in," he called. The door swung open and Malcom Fairchild wobbled in. Malcolm was a short, round, man with kind, brown eyes that Alistair feared had seen too much. He was the family lawyer and had guided Alistair through the storm of legal actions that running a multibillion dollar enterprise was bound to invite. Malcolm was also his best friend. “Isn't it to late in the day for a drink, Alistair?" “Malcolm, you have know me all these years and you still haven't learnt this from me? it is never too late in the day for drink.” Malcolm snorted and smiled a sad smile. He knew about the diagnosis. Alistair phoned him the minute he left for home; he had not even told his wife yet. He feared drama that telling her was going to trigger. Alistair poured his old friend a glass and handed it over. Malcolm accepted the glass without quarrel. Alistair had decided to approach his impended death in a business like manner, and so he did. "The will stands as written," he said. "With one exception. I intend to add a clause." Malcolm blinked. "A clause?" Alistair set his glass down with a sharp click. "Yes, a clause. If neither of my sons produces an heir within a year of my death, it all goes away. The land, all my fortune, the empire. Take it from them and give it to any suitable charity of your choosing." Malcolm's mouth fell open, then closed. "Alistair, that is a drastic measure. They're men, not the stallions that you bred.” "Desperate times call for desperate measures," Alistair said stiffly. "They are Bannermen, and Bannermen endure." He settled into his chair, the force of him filling the study the way it had once filled boardrooms and stockyards. “I am dying, Malcolm.” He said. “My family denies it. The herd of medical specialists they employed keep skirting around the flanks of the truth like a team of well-trained cattle dogs, but I know my number had come up.” Malcolm settled into a seat across Alistair at the table. He was silent. Alistair knew that if the tumor mushrooming inside his brain didn’t finish him off in months, the intense radiation therapy he was about to commence would. The only other soul willing to accept the truth was his good mate Malcolm. And it was not surprising since, as an estate lawyer, Malcolm dealt with human mortality every day of his working life. Alistair guessed that his lawyer friend had to deal with plenty of unusual will clauses, too, because his face remained impressively deadpan as he digested the changes he had just requested. Alistair drew a sheet of paper out of a drawer and began scribbling. Silence stretched. Outside, the wind rose, rattling the sparse jacaranda trees against the window. Soon, he set a single sheet of paper in front of Malcolm. “I assume you have plans to discuss this with your sons?” he asked. “You want me to tell them, so they can make the last months of my life a living hell?” Alistair snorted at the thought. “They will find out once I’m six feet under!” “Don’t you think they deserve a little warning? Any sort of warning at all? A year isn’t a lot of time to pull off the miracle of making a baby, even if one of them already had a ring on their finger and a crib waiting in the nursery.” Alistair shook his head aggressively. “You think I ought to hand them an escape clause?” He knew his sons were sharp. Too sharp for their own good sometimes, especially Alex. “Alex and Troy are both growing older. What they need is not more freedom, it’s a good hard shove. Otherwise, they’ll never plant their feet long enough to settle. They need this. They need to be reminded what it is to fight for something bigger than themselves. If I'm not here to make them see it, then I'll be damned if I don't set it up from the grave." Malcolm perused his written instructions again, his brow furrowed with a deep frown. “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I noted that his wording does not exclude Alex…” “There will be no exclusions. The stipulation has to be the same for the twins." "You don’t have to prove a damn thing to those boys,” Malcolm said finally, the words slow, deliberate, his frown digging deeper as if he could press the truth straight into the other man's bones. “They already know. They’ve always known. You’ve never played favorites, never made one feel less than the other. You raised them both and they have ve carried that with them, every step. You can see it plain as day in the men they’ve become. Strong, capable, decent. They stumble, sure, like any man will, but they’ve grown into men to be proud of.” Yes, it was true that they were sons any father would be proud to claim. But in the last few years, a chasm had grown between them. Each man caught up in his own ambitions, his own world, too busy or too self-absorbed to bridge the gap. This clause was meant to change that. To pull them back together. To spark the brotherhood he remembered so vividly from the days when they’d thundered across the wide, flat grasslands on the backs of scrappy ponies, dust flying at their heels. Later, when the ponies gave way to ropes and steers, they’d gone after wild bulls and cutthroat rivals with the same relentless fire. That unyielding drive was in their blood. And he was banking on it now, when the time came for them to face the challenge laid out in his will. “It has to be the same for both twins,” Alistair repeated firmly. He couldn’t exclude Alex; he did not want to exclude Alex. “It’s been barely four years since Ashleigh was killed in that fire” Malcolm reasoned. “The longer he lets himself drown in that grief, the steeper the climb back out,” Alistair said, his jaw tight as he leaned in, locking eyes with his friend. “Believe me, I know that truth better than most.” If his father hadn’t shoved him forward—tough love, the old man had called it at the time—Alistair might have vanished into the Australian outback after his first wife died. He would have buried himself in the land and the job, shut himself off from the world until there was nothing left of him but grief. But his father demanded otherwise, sending him overseas to shoulder the weight of the family’s British interests. And there, across an ocean, he crossed paths with a wild, Irish beauty who upturned his world. The woman who became his wife. The woman he loved with a depth and a fury that remade him. The way Alistair Bannerman saw it, he owed his boys that much, too. If his own father hadn't acted when he was young, he wouldn’t have met his wife and they would never have had their sons, Alex and Troy. Their son, Alex, whose grief over his fiancee's death has ripped him in many parts and made him as hard and remote as his wilderness home. Alex, Alistair reasoned, need some tough love of his own before he was too far gone to be rescued. “Does Narelle know about this?” Malcolm asked carefully. “She does not. And that is the way I want it to stay. You know she won’t approve.” Malcolm regarded Alex for a long time over the top of his glasses. “What a way to take all their minds off grieving for you.” Alistair frowned deeply. “That’s not the whole point of it. This isn’t about fairness, or about coddling feelings. It’s about making them lock arms and figure it out together. God knows, they’ll fight it every step, but that’s exactly why it has to be done. My family needs the shake-up. They need it badly. Alex, most of all, needs it slammed in his face before he loses himself completely.” “And what if your plan backfires? What if the boys reject this clause and walk away from their inheritance? They could lose Redcliffe Manor. Do you want the Bannerman assets split up and sold off? Narelle will have little left” “I will make arrangements for Narelle. But that won’t happen.” “Alistair, they won’t like this—” “They don’t have to like it,” Alistair said flatly. “Hell, I expect I’ll hear their griping clear from the pearly gates. But they’ll do it. Not for the money.” His gaze locked on his friend, unyielding, sharp as tempered steel. “They’ll do it for their mother.” That was the heart of it, the reason behind the clause he’d woven into the last will and testament. He wanted more than his sons working side by side. He wanted more than the slim hope they’d grab hold of family and settle their restless lives. This was for Narelle. For the woman whose loneliness had deepened, whose eyes had grown shadowed with sorrow. A child, her grandchild, within a year of his passing, to pierce that sadness with joy. In death, he meant to give her what had eluded him in life: a chance to see his beloved wife happy. And Alistair knew the only thing out of a multibillion-dollar empire that would be worth an Irish damn to her. At last, Malcolm sighed, defeat written in the slump of his shoulders. “Very well. I’ll add the clause.” When the lawyer had left, Alistair stayed in the study, alone with the ticking clock and the pulse in his head that reminded him his time was already running out. There was a photograph on the mantel. His sons at ten, grinning, sunburned, arms slung around each other's shoulders. He had not seen them smile that way in years. He raised the empty whiskey glass in a silent toast. Ma ke them whole again, he asked. Then, for the first time in his life, Alistair Bannerman prayed.