Double Standards // ziam

Chapter 22

"Mr. Payne." The secretary in Chicago bent down beside Liam, her voice lowered to a whisper to avoid disturbing the seven other major U.S. industrialists seated around the conference table discussing the final details of an international trade agreement. "I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but there's a Mr. Harry Styles on the phone for you..."

Liam nodded and slid his chair back. Seven men glanced up and looked at him with irritated accusation. Except in matters of extreme emergency, none of them was taking calls. During the last meeting and now this one, only Liam had received an urgent call, and the last time the meeting had to be aborted and rescheduled because he had abruptly walked out on them.

Liam strode from the conference room, gripped by the memory of the last time Harry's call had interrupted him in this meeting. That time Harry had fabricated some silly damned excuse for calling, so that he could say that Zayn had resigned.

"Yes, what is it?" Liam said, angry at the memory of him, angry at the pain that thinking of him always evoked.

"There's quite a celebration going on over in the engineering department," Harry began, his voice hesitant and confused. "Liam, even though Zayn gave Sinclair's copies of our four bids, we have just been awarded two of the four contracts. The low bidders on the other two contracts still haven't been announced." He paused, evidently waiting for Liam to answer. "I can't figure it out-what do you think?"

"I think," Liam snarled, "that the stupid bitch isn't smart enough to win a poker hand with a deck of marked cards."

"Sophia is conniving and sly and anything but stupid," Harry argued. "I think I'll get the file from Jack Collins in security and go over the figures that Zayn-"

"I told you what I wanted you to do," Liam interrupted in a low, deadly voice. "Regardless of who gets the remaining two contracts, I want Pay-co to bid on every job that Sinclair bids on, and I want you to bid it below our cost if necessary. I want that bitch and her husband out of business in one year!"

Liam slammed the phone down and stalked back into the conference room. The chairman looked at him with ill-concealed reproof for the interruption. "Now, may we resume?"

Liam nodded curtly. He voted carefully on the next three issues, but as the morning drifted into afternoon, and afternoon darkened into early evening, it became more and more impossible to think of anything but Zayn. Snow fell outside the windows of the Chicago skyscraper as the meeting continued, and Tony's outraged voice played through his mind... "You threw him out with no coat, no money, no nothing, and does he call Sophia? No! He walks eight blocks in the cold and rain, to collapse in my arms."

Eight blocks! Why hadn't the guards let him stop to get his coat? He remembered the thin shirt he'd been wearing. He remembered the sheer perfection of his olive skin; the exquisite taste of his lips; the way he had kissed him and sucked on him...

"Liam," the chairman said sharply, "I assume you are in favor of this proposal?"

Liam dragged his gaze from the windows. He had no idea what proposal was being discussed. "I'd like to hear more about it before I decide," he prevaricated.

Seven surprised faces turned toward him. "It's your proposal, Liam," the chairman scowled. "You wrote it."

"Then naturally I'm in favor of it," he informed them coolly.

The committee dined as a group in one of Chicago's most elegant restaurants. The moment their meal was over, Liam abruptly excused himself to return to his hotel. Snow fell in thick flakes, dusting his tan cashmere overcoat and clinging to his bare head as he strolled down Chicago's Michigan Avenue, glancing disinterestedly into exclusive shops whose brightly lit windows were decorated for Christmas.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, mentally cursing Harry for calling him this morning about Zayn, and cursing Zayn for walking into his life. Why hadn't he called Sophia to come and get him when the guards forcibly removed him from the Global building? Why in God's name had he walked eight blocks in freezing weather to go to Tony?

After he had hurt and degraded him, why had he wept at his feet like a heartbroken angel? Liam paused to take a cigarette out of his pack and put it in his mouth. Zayn's voice drifted through his mind, choked with racking sobs. "I love you so much," he had sobbed. "Please listen to me... Please don't do this to us..."

Fury and pain blazed through him. He could not take Zayn back, he reminded himself forcefully. He would never take him back.

He was willing to believe that Sophia had blackmailed him into giving her the bids. He was even willing to believe that Zayn hadn't told Sophia about the Rossi project. After all, if he had, Sinclair's men wouldn't have been swarming all over the village asking questions about Liam's activities-they'd have been asking about Rossi. Apparently they didn't even know the chemist's name. Even if they found out, it wouldn't matter. The lab tests had proved Rossi's formula to be only a fraction as effective as he'd claimed it was, besides being a skin and eye irritant.

Liam stopped at the light on the corner, where a man in a bright red Santa Claus costume was standing beside a black iron pot and ringing a bell. Christmas had never been particularly pleasant to Liam. It was a holiday that invariably called to mind the visit he had paid to his father as a boy; in fact, he never thought of him except at Christmas time.

Cars glided past him, their tires crunching in the fresh snow. This Christmas could have been different; it could have been a beginning. He would have taken Zayn to Switzerland. No-he would have spent it at home with him. He would have built a roaring fire in the fireplace, and they could have started their own traditions. He would have made love to him in front of the fire, with the lights from the Christmas tree glowing on his smooth olive skin...

Liam angrily jerked his mind away from those thoughts and stalked across the street, ignoring the horns that blared their protest and the headlights flying toward him. There would be no Christmases with Zayn. He wanted him badly enough to forgive him for almost anything, but he could not, would not, forgive or forget the fact that he had betrayed him to his father and stepmother. Perhaps in time he could have forgiven him for conspiring against him, but not with the Sinclairs...Never with them.

Liam inserted his key into the double doors of his penthouse suite.

"Where the hell have you been?" Harry Styles demanded from the Queen Anne sofa where he was lounging with his feet propped on an antique coffee table. "I've come to talk about the bids Zayn gave Sophia."

Liam jerked off his coat, furious at having his suite invaded, his privacy infringed upon and particularly at being forced-even for the moment it was going to take to get Harry out of here-to talk about Zayn again. "I told you," he said in a low, deadly voice, "that I wanted Sinclair out of business and I told you how I wanted it done. When you explained your part in Zayn's complicity, I excused it, but I will not-"

"You don't have to put the Sinclairs out of business," Harry interrupted quietly as Liam stalked toward him. "Zayn is doing it for you." From the sofa beside him, Harry picked up copies of the original bids and the altered copies that Zayn had made to give Sophia. "He changed the figures, Liam," he said somberly.

***

The meeting of the committee on international trade reconvened at precisely nine o'clock the following morning. The chairman of the committee looked at the six men seated around the conference table. "Liam Payne will not be present today," he informed the thunderous-looking group. "He asked me to express his regrets and to explain that he was called away on an urgent matter."

In unison, six outraged faces turned to glare with impotent hostility at the vacant chair of their missing member. "Last time it was a labor relations problem. What the hell is Payne's problem this time?" a jowly man demanded unsympathetically.

"A union," the chairman answered. "He said he is going to try to negotiate the most important union of his life."