‘You’d depend on Rose to get the affairs under control?’
‘You’re the international lawyer,’ Erhard said shrewdly. ‘I’m willing to wager you know exactly what can be done.’
He did. He’d been thinking about it all week. The chance to make a difference…
He’d never belonged. His mother, Zia, had left Alp de Montez as a troubled teenager. She’d ended up in Australia, addicted to drugs, pregnant with him. His childhood until he was eight had been a struggle to survive, lurching from fleeting intervals living with his increasingly erratic mother, to extended periods in a long string of foster homes.
Then Ruby had found him. She’d plucked him off the streets of Sydney, and from then on his base had been with Ruby and her tribe of foster sons. Ruby had given him security, but still he felt rootless.
At some really basic level Erhard’s proposition left him breathless. What had Rose said? An option ‘for the greater good’. It just might be the chance to make a difference.
He thought back to the frightened girl who’d been his mother. She’d want this. He knew she would. She’d been desperately homesick for Alp de Montez but there was no way her increasingly disgusted family would have funded her to go home.
He could go home on her behalf now. With this woman by his side.
Marriage. It wasn’t such a frightening thought if it was done for the right reasons. But were Rose’s reasons right? How could a woman like this want to marry a complete stranger?
She was his cousin.