The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 3 (3 page)

“Who hasn’t? Your name’s been on everything since that space movie came out.”

He inclined his head slightly. “The movie’s promotional firm was quite thorough,” he said, his tone a little dark, clearly not pleased with his own press.

I walked over to the window and watched a few people braving the sharp wind to walk the paths that ran beside the river.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” he said. “I just don’t think you need to stick around if you don’t want to.”

“I can’t leave you alone.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged, my eyes still on the river below. “Because I would never forgive myself if I left and something bad happened to you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not every day I see a guy I’ve…” I stopped, embarrassed by what I almost said.

“A guy you’ve what?”

I shook my head. “I was just going to say that it’s not every day I see someone have a seizure, that’s all.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of girl who lies.” He was behind me again, but I didn’t turn around this time. “Why don’t you finish what you were saying?”

“Because it doesn’t matter.”

“What if it matters to me?”

His voice had softened. And he seemed closer. In fact, I imagined I could feel the heat of his breath brushing against the hair on the back of my head. I wanted to turn, wanted to see where he was and the expression on his face. But I was afraid I wouldn’t see what I so desperately wanted to.

And then he took the option away. He laid his hand on my shoulder and encouraged me to turn with a little pressure, a little tug.

“Annie,” he breathed, the sound of my name on his lips raising goose bumps once again. I looked up at him, my breath catching in my throat. He brushed the back of his fingers against my cheek, a friendly caress that turned to something else as his fingers slid slowly down the side of my throat. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m an asshole.”

I nodded and that made him smile. And that broke the tension that had grown between us.

He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.

“Let’s try this again. I’m Logan.”

I laughed. “Annie.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Annie. Would you like to share my sandwich with me?”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

He took my hand and led me to the couch, tugging me down so that we were sitting very close together. Then, he handed me a wedge of his sandwich and started to talk about the merits of mustard. He had me laughing so hard I never managed to take more than one bite of the sandwich.

***

Madison

I stood by the bar in Rawn’s office, sipping a glass of water absently. I couldn’t stop running the conversation Logan and I had in the hospital through my mind, over and over again. I wasn’t good with secrets. I understood why he told me, but I didn’t like that he had asked that I not share it with anyone else, especially Annie.

Poor Annie.

I knew how much she liked Logan. She even told me once that she believed they were meant to be together—not necessarily forever, but for a while. I tried to discourage her then, but now? If she knew what I knew…

“You okay?”

Rawn slid up behind me and ran his hand over my hip. I leaned back into him, resting my head on his shoulder.

“When is all this craziness going to stop?”

“I don’t know, babe.” He kissed my neck lightly. “The CEO is not thrilled. She’s probably on the phone with Conrad right now, instructing him to squash the rumors spinning around town as quickly as possible.”

“Do you think it was someone at the hospital who leaked it?”

“Don’t know. Conrad said the reporters who have left messages for him seemed to know he was at a photoshoot for Cepheus. That can only mean one of two things: someone from Cepheus leaked the information, or Logan told someone what he was doing this morning and that person leaked the information.”

“Maybe he told one of the nurses at the hospital.”

“Maybe.” Rawn sighed, his breath washing over me like a troubled wind. “It always seems to come back to Cepheus. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“But why would someone want to hurt Logan? He doesn’t work here; he was just doing me a favor.”

“Because he’s a name.” Rawn squeezed my arms before stepping around me and pouring himself a drink. “News of this type could spread like wildfire because of his celebrity status. It has the potential to be national news, maybe even international. This could hurt Cepheus’ bottom line for a while to come.”

“Why?”

He took a healthy swig of his drink before turning to me. “Cepheus is a publicly owned company. Bad publicity like this could not only affect sales, it could cause the stocks to plummet. And Cepheus has been on a rocky foundation for more than a year, anyway, because of a frivolous lawsuit last year that accused us of stealing the blueprints for a product and passing them off as our own.”

“Really?” I hadn’t heard about that, and I did a lot of research into Cepheus before I applied to work here. “Did it go to court?”

“No. But we spent a lot of money fighting to keep it out of court. After we settled, someone released a copy of the settlement to a scientific journal who, in turn, contacted a bunch of our private clients, informing them of what had happened. Some of them dropped us as their suppliers of the product, cutting into our bottom line.”

“I didn’t realize…”

I thought about the tension in Rawn every time we talked about his work, but I had always assumed it was rooted in his distaste for the job in general. Now, I realized that it had just as much to do with the possibility that Cepheus might go under and he could find himself without a job.

Rawn had never gone to college. He got this job because he impressed the engineers when he pointed out problems with the blueprints his father worked on in Cepheus’ labs. And he couldn’t take a comparable job with another company because he signed a non-compete clause when he joined the company. He had few options…

There was a lot on the line for Rawn.

I moved close to him, sliding my hand slowly up the front of his heavily starched shirt. “I’m sure Conrad will work his PR magic and sweep all this under the appropriate rug.”

“If not?”

I shrugged. “Then, we’ll survive. We’ll start our own company if we have to.”

“I love your optimism,” he said, as he pressed his lips to my forehead. “Let’s just hope we don’t have to do that.”

I smiled, but some of what he had just said made me wonder. Was it possible that what happened this morning
was
connected to my kidnapping last month? Could this mean that whoever had been behind that wasn’t just Peggy Duprey and Aurora, but someone totally different? And if that was the case, who?

I still couldn’t shake the memory of that man…the man who came into the house where I was being held. His voice, when he spoke my name, was a purposeful whisper. But I recognized it. And the other man—I know there was someone else involved, not just the lackeys the police said they were searching for, but I suspected they had decided weren’t big enough fish to waste their time on. I just didn’t know why. I didn’t know what the end game was.

But I knew we needed to stop it.

It made me uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as Logan dropping his secrets on me. I didn’t like the thought of someone coming after the people I love…Mellissa, Annie, Rawn…and I really didn’t like not knowing what to do about it.

Rawn ran his hand slowly over the side of my face. “You want me to take you home?”

“No.”

I suddenly didn’t want to be apart from him. What if something else happened? I ran my hand over the back of his and rose up onto my tiptoes to kiss him. He groaned silently against my lips, as he drew me into him. I slid my hand under his suit coat, annoyed by the necessity of all these pieces of clothing between us. I wanted to be close to him—as close as humanly possible—and stay there for as long as possible. I wanted to go back to the simplicity of our early relationship—when he whisked me away on his private jet just to see the stars over Hawaii, when we sat outside an Italian restaurant and he fed me strange foods while I sat with a blindfold over my eyes. I wanted to play those trust games, to spend hours getting to know him even better, to lie naked in his arms and do things I never imagined myself capable of months, even weeks ago.

I wanted the danger that began with my kidnapping to be over.

***

Mellissa

“Hey, love,” Conrad whispered, a little amusement in his voice. “Wake up.”

I reached up and pushed the hair out of my face, focusing on him in the confusion of the first seconds of consciousness. People were moving around the room behind him, trying not to notice the two of us, someone on the phone and someone else delivering a stack of papers tucked into manila file folders. It took a moment, but it finally sank in that I was in Conrad’s office and I’d fallen asleep on his couch.

“Oh, sorry,” I mumbled, as I quickly sat up and wiped the drool from my chin, wondering if I had snored, too.

“No worries,” Conrad said. “We’re finishing up. Why don’t you let me take you home?”

I got the annoyed glance of his personal assistant, just that look telling me that it was going to be a very long night for Conrad and I was just interrupting it.

“I can get a cab.”

“No, you won’t. Do you really think I’m going to send you out by yourself after everything that’s been going on?”

“Peggy’s in jail.”

“Yeah, well, Madison doesn’t seem to think Peggy was working on her own. And I’m beginning to wonder if she’s right.”

“Why?”

Conrad shook his head, glancing over his shoulder at the others in the room. “Let’s go home.”

I let him take my hand and pull me off the couch. Sally, one of his brilliant employees, waved politely as Conrad explained that he’d be back in an hour or so. I liked Sally, and she seemed to like me. She was the only one in the office who spoke to me more than to say hello or goodbye at the end of my frequent visits. Aurora’s resignation at Cepheus left me and Russell, her assistant, in limbo for a while…more me than Russell. Russell had the good luck of being the CEO’s nephew, so they’d stuck him in another department for the time being. But, apparently, they didn’t need another receptionist anywhere. Human resources assured me that my position would be available once they hired a new vice-president of development, but that could take upwards of five to six months. In the meantime, I had a lot of time on my hands, and that had led to Conrad dragging me into the office several times a week. Not that I didn’t enjoy it—I actually found it pretty fascinating. I loved listening to Conrad use his charm to convince some reporter or an editor to write what he wanted about the companies he represented instead of the naked truth. He was so good at it that sometimes I couldn’t tell what the truth was and what was a spin he’d put on it even when he had just told me the honest truth.

PR was just glass and mirrors, he told me once. But it seemed like it was a heck of a lot of charm, too.

I closed my eyes once I was settled in the front seat of his car. I couldn’t shake this sudden exhaustion that seemed to descend over me the moment the sun went down most days. Stress...maybe. I must have dozed off again because when I next opened my eyes, we were parked in front of Conrad’s house.

“You could have just taken me home.”

“I thought you might sleep a little better here. You’ve been so restless at your house.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek lightly. “You have to stop feeling so guilty about deciding to leave your grandmother in Summer Oaks.”

“It’s a good place for her. I just…it seems so odd being in that house without her.”

“She was never here, so maybe you won’t feel so odd about it.”

I couldn’t really argue with his logic. But I also suspected he had another reason for wanting me to stay here tonight.

He had a state of the art security system in his house.

He led the way upstairs, pushing open the door to his impressive master bedroom with that huge, custom-made bed dominating the center. Was it awful that my first thought when I saw it was how good it would feel to climb between the sheets and go back to sleep?

Conrad moved up behind me and lifted the hair from my neck. He kissed me gently, his breath awakening nerve endings just as quickly as his touch. I moved back into him, my body instantly coming alive, as he slid his arms around me and his hands began to explore my curves.

“I could use a hot shower,” he whispered against my ear. “What about you?”

I turned in his arms, sliding my hand over his jaw and into his hair. I kissed him, a lingering touch that made him moan.

“Tell me what’s going on, Conrad. No more secrets, remember?”

He groaned. “I’d rather take a shower.”

“Me, too. But I want to know what’s going on.”

With a heavy sigh, he reluctantly drew me to the loveseat situated on the far side of the room in front of his flat screen television. He sat back and ran his hand over his face, suddenly looking more exhausted than I felt.