Atu Quayson stood before his father’s desk, his spine straight and his resolve locked in place.
It had taken him a lot to come here. More courage than he wanted to admit he’d needed. He was a man now, dammit. Twenty-four going on seventy, one older aunt liked to say, while tsking.
He suspected this conversation was going to disintegrate into yet another battle of wills. All his conversations with his father had since he’d hit puberty.
Since he’d become starkly cognisant of the fact that he would always be second best. The spare to the true heir of the Quayson dynasty—his brother Fiifi.
And yet fight he did.
Because to stop fighting for what he wanted was to wither away and fade into inconsequence. Unfortunately for Joseph Quayson, this particular son had no intention of doing any such thing.
Silence throbbed as he awaited his father’s response to the terms he’d just laid down.
He watched the man who’d sired him rise and stroll to the large window on the second floor of their home, set on its own proud hill in the prestigious Quayson Hills enclave in Accra, Ghana.
Atu didn’t need to join his father at the window to know what was happening below.
The sounds of thumping music, laughter and gaiety marking his older brother’s twenty-fifth birthday party were well within earshot. Over six hundred guests were spread out across the extensive grounds.
He should be there, mingling with friends and acquaintances while fending off hangers-on hoping to get deeper into the Quayson inner circle
She was down there too.
Amelie Hayford.
The woman with the surname that made her forbidden fruit. And as with forbidden fruit, he’d been unable to tear his thoughts from her since their encounter a few weeks ago. Or how she’d moved on the dance floor.
His lips twisted at the thought of dropping her name into this conversation with his father. It would end this meeting most conclusively, the feud between the Quaysons and Hayfords seeming to have picked up steam in the past year.
But he stayed put because he’d postponed this conversation for weeks.
After an age, his father faced him, his hands braced behind his back. “You seem to think there’s room for negotiation here. There isn’t, son. Your brother takes over the majority of the family business next week. You’re needed here, in Ghana, to assist him with whatever he needs.”
Atu futilely tried to stop the arrow of anguish that pierced him at hearing those words from his father’s lips. At the utter lack of recognition of the pain he was causing his own son by relegating him callously to second best. A flash of the self-pity he used to feel when his father spoke in such terms threatened to resurface.
He ruthlessly suppressed it.
He would cut off a limb before he let his father see the pain his words caused.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you, Father.” Again, he wanted to add, because hadn’t he been a disappointment in his father’s eyes for as long as he could remember? “My plans are already in place. I’m meeting with developers in Abu Dhabi in ten days to discuss a possible collaboration.”
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