The Millionaire's Bet [BOOK ONE][#Wattys2015][#SYTYCW15][#CarinaPress]

part eighteen

ALYSSA

I didn't really know what the hell I was doing, or even the reason I was actually doing it, but I did know that I was tired of being involved in a pointless feud between two families who hated each other because of something one man did to the both of them. I thought, stupidly, that I could bring the both of them together and I could make them realise that they really weren't that different from each other—now that I had both the mothers in the same room though, my idea didn't seem so clever, and I didn't know how to make the atmosphere than it had already become.

The table was set, the dinner slowly cooking in the kitchen and it should be ready by the time the boys make their appearance, and both woman were sitting in the same room. They may not have spoken a word to each other, since they arrived an hour ago now, but they weren't tearing each other's eyes out and I would like to think that's an achievement in itself.

"So—" I dragged out when I took a seat on the sofa opposite the pair of them and allowed my gaze to drift between them. I had never noticed before just how much Andrew looked like his mother, inheriting her wonderful blue eyes was an added bonus I guess, but now that I looked at Diana, I could see just how much of Diana was in Andrew. I knew that I was weird for staring at her, but she looked bloody good for her age, not that I was surprised, she seemed like a woman who took care of herself, but I was amazed with just how good she did look.

If the roles were reversed, and I was the fifty year old woman, I would have grey hair and wrinkles all over my face, especially with a son like Andrew to keep me on my toes and a granddaughter to make sure I was never bored. Diana, though, was nothing like that with only a couple of wrinkles here and there and her hair was a dull shade of blonde—though there were a few grey hairs making their way to the surface—and she had a rather calm demeanour about her. But, if there is one thing Diana didn't stand for, it was people messing with her family.

"Cut the crap, Alyssa, and tell us the reason you brought us here," Diana replied. I knew that she had a scary temper on her, I remember the occasions on which I had heard her shouting at either her son for doing something which she didn't approve of or where she had shouted after kids who thought it was amusing the knock on her door and then run, but I had never experienced it for myself; I knew that was going to change this evening though and I was going to meet the Diana Collins which so many people feared.

"I just want to talk, starting with a question which the both of you can answer," I shrugged. I may not have wanted their life stories but, since their sons had decided that they were going to involve me with their pathetic games, I felt I had the right to know why I was being used and I also the right to know why the both of them hated each other—given that I had been in relationship with one and I couldn't get the other off my mind, not that I was lying when I said that I loved Darren, I actually did love him, but there was still something about Andrew which was drawing me to him like a flame draws a moth.

"And what would that be?" Diana wasn't impressed with my reply, not that I expected her to be, but I wanted answers and I was going to get them one way or another.

"Why the hell do you two actually hate each other?" I had wanted to know the answer to that question since Darren first told me that his mother disliked Diana. I understand that, while Diana was married to her husband, he slept with another woman and impregnated her at the same time she was pregnant with their daughter, but Tracey didn't know that he was married and she also didn't know that he already had a family elsewhere in the country—she loved the man, was even willing to marry him so that they could always be together, and he was the model father to their children, but she wasn't to blame for anything David did or even told her.

"She slept with my hus—"

"Yeah. I think the entire of New York knows that part, but Tracey didn't know that David was married to you, not when he told her that he was single and insisted that he had no other children beside the son she was carrying not long after they first slept together," I knew that there wasn't an actual reason for Diana and Tracey to hate each other, David had fucked the both of them over in various ways, but I wanted to understand what was going through their heads because it would help me understand the mind-set of their children.