The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 2 (9 page)

“But you want to know who that man was. And that comes with my family history.”

Silence fell heavy between us. And then I heard the squeak of his office chair’s wheels as he pulled it back to the desk and took a seat.

“Fine.”

I cleared my throat, the memory of the storm rushing back to me, so vivid even after all this time. We were expecting it, but not to the degree with which it hit. I was sleeping on the couch, exhausted after staying up half the night watching
The Weather Channel
with Memaw and Uncle Mike. When it hit, the winds were the first thing. It was like a million angry cats were crying outside our doors. And the walls vibrated like the strings of a guitar. By the time the water came, I had already worked myself into a fit of panic. I was thirteen and everything that was supposed to be safe and secure about my life was coming apart at the seams. And that was just the beginning.

“The storm destroyed our house and my uncle’s bar. The insurance didn’t cover floods, so it took nearly everything he had to rebuild the house. The bar—it was a complete loss. He never would have been able to reopen. All he had ever done was tend bar. But working in someone else’s place didn’t offer even half the money he’d been making before. Within just a few months of the storm we were hurting bad enough that even I was aware of how bad it was.”

I took another swipe at the tears on my cheeks. “That’s when Johnny Duprey approached him. Said he’d give him the money he needed to rebuild his bar. And all he had to do in return was take a few bets. It seemed fairly simple. It wasn’t like my uncle was the only one who turned to the dark side to survive in the aftermath of Katrina.”

“Yeah, but your uncle did a little bit more than take a few bets.”

I nodded. “I was a kid. I had no idea what was going on. But at trial, my uncle said—”

“At trial?”

I glanced over at him. “You knew he went to jail, right?”

Conrad shook his head. “No, I didn’t. When Aurora and I left New Orleans, I never looked back.”

I turned, leaned back against the window, the cool refreshing against my burning skin, and crossed my arms. “My uncle came under the suspicion of the FBI after only about a year, I guess. They started watching his bar, keeping track of who came and went, taking note when one of Johnny’s lieutenants showed up. After a while, they had enough to approach my uncle and ask him to help them get Johnny.”

“Your uncle turned on Johnny Duprey?” Conrad whistled under his breath. “That takes balls.”

“Yeah.” I ran my hands over my face, wiping away the last of my tears, and smoothed my moist palms over my still drying hair. “He tried to get out a few times and Johnny wouldn’t let him. He thought that his next best option was to turn on him. He’d have to go to jail, but the FBI promised him they would make sure he got leniency for his cooperation. And that Memaw and I would be protected.”

“Let me get this straight,” Conrad said, leaning back in his chair. “Your uncle was working with the Feds in ’07?”

“Yeah.”

“Hell, that’s why he…” Conrad shook his head, a bewildered look on his face. “Shit,” he whispered.

“What?”

“All these years I thought your uncle screwed me over. But he was really just keeping me from making the biggest mistake of my life.”

I didn’t understand. I pushed away from the window and moved closer to his desk, watching him struggle with something. He ran his fingers through his hair and then buried his face in his hands.

“Shit!” He looked up at me, his eyes rimmed in red. “All these years I was so angry at him. But now…he called Aurora.”

“What?”

“I went to make a bet one day, after he warned me to stop. And Aurora shows up, screaming at me about how I promised to stop and how I was going to mess up both our futures. It got so bad that that goon your uncle kept in drinks at the end of the bar came over and escorted us out of the building. The next time I went back, the goon wouldn’t even let me in the door. I thought…” he shook his head, a soft, humorless chuckle slipping from between his lips. “I was so stupid.”

“If you made a bet with him, the FBI would have had your name—”

“And I would have been rounded up when they started arresting people.”

“But my uncle wouldn’t let you. He kept your name off the list.”

Conrad nodded. “If he hadn’t done that, I never would have married Aurora. I never would have built this business.” He stared at me for a second. “I would have fulfilled the other side of my mother’s prediction.”

“My uncle was a good man.”

The irony wasn’t lost. Even on me.

I sank into a chair that was positioned strategically in front of Conrad’s desk.

“You really didn’t know?”

“No.”

“But when you said my uncle screwed you over and you should call Johnny Duprey—”

“It was an empty threat. I just meant that I should tell Johnny how your uncle refused to take bets from paying customers. It’s the same threat I made to your uncle all those years ago.”

It would have been funny if it wasn’t so frustratingly stupid.

“I’m in the Witness Security Program. Johnny got a life sentence, but there are a dozen of his lieutenants who got shorter sentences or managed to stay out of jail altogether, and they’re pretty eager to hurt my uncle any way they can.”

The color drained from Conrad’s face.

“The man you saw me with this morning? He’s my WITSEC contact. He found out about Madison’s kidnapping, that I was the original target, and he wants to move me out of Portland. That’s what we were arguing about.”

Conrad came around the desk and leaned against it just a few feet in front of me. “That’s what you meant, when you said you didn’t know what might happen in the future.”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head, a soft chuckle again slipping from between his lips. “I’m such a fucking idiot. I should have known there was more to it than what I knew. I just…I assumed you left New Orleans to escape your uncle. All this...” He waved his hand. “It never crossed my mind.”

“I’m sorry.”

He grunted, as he grabbed my arms and pulled me up into him. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, running his hand over my back. “None of this is your doing. You’re just an innocent bystander.”

I moved closer into his arms and buried my face in his chest. For a long second, I took pleasure in feeling his body wrapped around mine. I tried to imagine what it would be like to know that this would always be here, that I would always have the right to take comfort from his touch. To fall in love and trust that we would never be separated.

It was a dream meant for someone else.

“They want to put Memaw into a home and move me next week.”

“Next week?”

“It’s usually a lot sooner than that. I think the only reason they’re waiting is because of Memaw.”

“And then what?”

“And then I start over again, for the fourth time. This’ll be the first time I’ll be on my own. I won’t be able to take anything personal with me. I won’t be able to call you or any of the other friends I’ve made. And I won’t be able to see any of you again. Including Memaw.”

That thought—saying it out loud—took the steel out of my knees. I slipped forward, and Conrad caught me. He lifted me into his arms and carried me to the small couch against the back wall of his office. But he didn’t just lay me down. He sat and pulled me into his arms, cradling me like a child. And I fell apart like a child.

“I don’t want this,” I whispered when I had some control. “I don’t want to run for the rest of my life.”

“What happens if you elect to leave the WITSEC program?”

“They stop protecting me.” I rubbed my cheek a little roughly. “They leave me to my own devices. Chances are good Johnny’s people will find me fairly quickly after that.”

“They would just dump you?”

“They would take away everything they’ve been doing to keep me hidden. No more monitoring the local press, no more keeping tabs with the local police. No more paying for my rent, no more dealing with the landlord so he won’t get curious about my grandmother and me. No more meetings with Richard to make sure nothing unusual has been happening in the neighborhood.” I snuggled closer against him. “I don’t know what else. I’m sure they do things that I don’t even know about.”

“But you would keep your name.”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

Conrad kissed the top of my head. “Well,” he said quietly, “we have a week to spend together and to figure out what’s next.”

“We know what’s next. I have to leave.”

“Maybe.”

I sat up to look him in the eye, hope planting a seed deep in my heart. But before I could form the words to ask him what he was thinking, the door to his office burst open.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Goldstein,” his secretary said as two plainclothes detectives—the same two who had interviewed Madison at the hospital—charged into the office behind her.

“Conrad Goldstein?” the taller one asked.

Conrad gently moved around me, standing so that he blocked my view of the room.

“Yes?”

“You’re under arrest,” the younger man said, grabbing Conrad’s arm, pulling him into the center of the room, and turning him to face me. “You have the right to remain silent,” he began, making me feel as though I had suddenly fallen into a bad rerun of
Law and Order.

“What’s this about?” Conrad asked, as the detective snapped handcuffs around his wrists.

The detective ignored him, preferring to finish reading him his rights.

I jumped to my feet, beginning to wonder how much more of this day I could take.

“You have to tell him what the charges are,” I announced, not even sure I was right, but pretending I was.

The tall detective looked at me over his partner’s head. “You were there at the hospital, weren’t you?” He opened the notepad he seemed to always have in his hand, again reminding me of a television detective. “Mellissa Anderson?”

I nodded.

“You were the intended victim. Funny finding you here.”

“What is this about?” I demanded again.

The detective looked from me to Conrad, an odd smile on his lips. “Your boyfriend is being arrested under suspicion of orchestrating Miss Miller’s kidnapping.”

Again that feeling of being doused with ice water.

Could my life possibly get any worse?

“I called his lawyer.”

“Good. Do you have a car?”

The pretty secretary stared at me for a second, as though she didn’t understand simple English.

“A car,” I repeated. “We should probably go down to the police station and see if we can expedite his release.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, turning around. “I do.”

She wandered to her desk a little too slowly, as though she were in the midst of shock, or something. It reminded me vaguely of the day Uncle Mike told Memaw and me that he was going to jail. Memaw had the same distracted, unable-to-concentrate attitude for a full two days afterward. But when the FBI actually came to the house and made the arrest, she was a rock. She knew exactly what to do, who to call, and how to handle the whole thing.

I wished I could call her now and ask her to come fix this for me.

“Here,” Conrad’s secretary said, holding out a set of keys. “You should be the one to go.”

My southern upbringing told me that I should refuse, but I didn’t have time to fight with her. So I grabbed the keys and rushed toward the door, aware of Conrad’s employees standing in the hallway, wondering to each other why their fearless leader was just marched out of here in handcuffs.

I didn’t stop to ask what kind of car the secretary drove. Thank God for the little fobs with the remote lock/unlock buttons and the little red alarm button. I found it in a breeze, a Ford Fiat that looked like it had seen better days. But it got me to the police station without too much trouble, just a rough idle at stop lights. I should mention it to her when I returned it…

The lobby of the police station was crowded. I half expected to find Conrad sitting on a bench there, but he was nowhere to be seen. I stood in line for nearly fifteen minutes before I was finally able to ask the desk sergeant where Conrad was.

“He hasn’t been processed yet. Take a seat. Someone will come out and speak to you when he is.”

Great.

My cellphone rang as I turned away. Russell. It was then that I realized that I hadn’t called work to let them know I would be running late. Not that I was going to need this job after this week. I could quit today and it wouldn’t make much difference. But there was still that southern upbringing…I didn’t want to leave Einstein and Russell in a bind.

“Hey, Russell,” I said, stepping out the door to avoid the noise in the lobby. “I’m sorry, I should have called sooner.”

“I was just going to ask if you could bring some lattés when you come in. I’m overloaded and could use a little caffeine.”

“I don’t think I’m going to make it in today. Something’s happened—”

“Ms. Goldstein is here, and she’s expects you to be at your desk.”

“I realize that.”

“You’re supposed to give at least an hour’s notice.”

“I know that, too.” I watched a couple of uniform cops bring a screaming woman up the steps, my heart sinking. I couldn’t help but think—who knows what might have happened to me if my uncle hadn’t taken me in, if he hadn’t made the choices he did, and if I hadn’t agreed to the rules and regulations of WITSEC.

My thoughts again drifted to those dark days right after my uncle was arrested.

“You said Ms. Goldstein was there?”

“Yes. But she’s very busy, and I’m sure she would appreciate if her receptionist bothered to come into work—”

“Can I talk to her, please?”

That shut Russell up. It surprised me. I didn’t think anything was capable of shutting Russell up.

“If you plan on pleading your case—”

“No. This is of a more personal nature.”

Russell groaned. “Fine. But if you aren’t at your desk tomorrow, don’t expect your job to be waiting for you on Wednesday.”

“I understand.”

A moment later, Einstein’s voice came over the phone.

“Are you ill again?” she asked with real concern in her voice. “Maybe you should start taking some vitamin C. I hear it does wonders for the immune system.”

“No, I’m not ill. It’s Conrad.”

“Is something wrong with Conrad?”

“You know about Madison’s kidnapping last week, right?”

“Kidnapping?”

“Has Rawn told you about the investigation? Do you know why they would think that Conrad would have something to do with it?”

“Conrad should be at work right now.”

I started to tell her about his arrest, but thought better of it. Instead, I asked, “Have you spoken to Rawn since last week?”

“Of course. We were in a meeting together just this morning on the new electron microscope he’s thinking about producing. Our scientists think they could have a workable blueprint in a month or so.”

“That’s great,” I said. “But did he say anything about corporate espionage or kidnappings?”

There was a long silence. “We talked about an electron microscope,” she said. “And a new mass spectrometry detector.”

“Okay. Then he didn’t mention anything about Conrad?”

“No, not that I remember.” There was a clear tone of confusion in her voice. “Is Conrad okay?”

“He’s fine.”

I dragged my fingers through my hair as a man came walking up the steps dressed in a suit. I found myself hoping that he was Conrad’s lawyer. If I couldn’t get Conrad’s ex-wife to help me—I still didn’t even know why he’d been arrested, not really—I didn’t know who else to ask for help.

I shut off my phone a minute later and went back inside, the dregs of humanity screaming all around me. There were a couple of women dressed in less than appropriate clothing sitting on a bench, handcuffed to one another. A man with blood running down his cheeks from a pretty significant head wound sat beside them. A couple of teenagers with more tattoos than I’d ever seen on a single human being were there too. And then there were the worried parents, the crying wives, and the indifferent boyfriends, sisters, brothers, and grandparents standing around, waiting for their loved one to be brought out.

After a while, I found a place to sit that wasn’t too close to a questionable character or near the random puddles of unidentifiable fluids that seemed to be scattered throughout the room. I checked my phone dozens of times, not sure what I was hoping to see. Around noon, I slipped out onto the front steps again to check in with Christy. Everything was fine at home, thank goodness. I wasn’t sure if I could handle another crisis today.

And I thought Friday was a gray day.

I was about to give up and get in line to ask the desk sergeant if perhaps someone had forgotten to let me know what was going on with Conrad. I started to get to my feet when the door suddenly burst open and Rawn strode through.

“Ra—Mr. Jackman?” I said.

He glanced at me. “Miss Anderson. What are you doing here?”

“Conrad was arrested this morning.”

“I know. The police have asked for me to come down and make a statement.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You? Then you knew what was happening?”

“Yes.”

He brushed past me and walked up to the front desk, bypassing all the other people who had been waiting in line to speak to the desk sergeant, as though his power at Cepheus Scientific and his money made him more important than all those other people.

Before Rawn could fully explain to the sergeant who he was, however, Conrad and a man in a suit I had never seen before came out another set of doors to the left of the main desk.

All I heard was Conrad mumbling something that was unrepeatable. And then he swung his fist at Rawn’s perfect jaw. Rawn fell back, slamming into the glass partition that separated the lobby from the sergeant’s desk. He raised his hand to his face, his fingers coming away dotted with blood.

“After everything, you dare to pin this bullshit on me?” Conrad asked, his face reddened with anger. “Everything I did for you.”

“You did for me?” Rawn asked, straightening his suit jacket as he rose to his full height, towering over Conrad by an inch or two. “I think you got that wrong, brother. I was the one helping you out.”

“That would be the way you remember it.”

The suited man grabbed Conrad by the shoulders and hissed something in his ear. Conrad pulled away, but he also turned away from Rawn. When his eyes fell on me, I could see the pain in his eyes. But then it slowly slipped away and was replaced with sadness and a weary sort of exhaustion that was more about emotional pain than a lack of sleep.

He pulled me into his arms and breathed deep the scent of my hair.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

***

He directed me to a luxurious, but modestly so, colonial on the outskirts of town. It was a pretty white and black house that seemed to fit his style to a T. The moment we stepped through the double doors into the marble foyer, he grabbed my hand and led the way upstairs.

“I have to get the stink of that place off of me,” was his only explanation.

His bedroom was situated at the front of the house between another set of double doors. These ones were a pretty oak with rosettes at each of the four corners of the frame. Inside I expected to find dark paneling and dark wood furniture. Instead, I found brightly colored walls, three of them a creamy green and the fourth—the accent wall—a dark Kelly green that was interspersed with thick, pale gray stripes. The floor was a dark wood with an area rug under the bed and under the couch that sat in a comfortable entertainment area on far side of the room. There was a huge television, a state of the art sound system, and a couple of lounge chairs with the couch…a perfect place to unwind at the end of the day.

But it was the bed that dominated the room.

It was a four-poster, king-sized thing made of what looked like recovered barn wood, or some other western-style design. It was massive, but it was also a work of art. There was something about the way the wood was put together that gave the bed a unique appearance. And the down comforter that flowed across it made it look like a place tired bones would love to retire for the rest of eternity.

“Beautiful,” I said, walking along the far edge, running my fingers over one of the posts before catching a corner of the comforter and rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger.

“It’s custom made.” Conrad slipped up behind me, sliding his arms around my waist before he dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “This guy in Austin buys salvaged wood and makes furniture out of it. He said this wood was taken from an old barn in Vermont.”

“It’s almost too pretty to sleep on.”

He kissed my neck with a soft movement of his full lips. “Who said anything about sleeping?”

I turned and he kissed me, his lips warm and moist. He tasted like stale coffee and smelled a little like cigarettes. But his hands were smooth, as they slipped under the back of my sweatshirt, his fingers persistent as they sought out the back of my bra. But he didn’t try very hard to get it undone. In fact, he pulled away after a moment.

“I smell like an old cop.”

“I don’t mind.”

“But I do.”

He tore off his suit jacket and began tugging at the buttons on his shirt as he walked to the bathroom. He dropped his shirt on the floor as he stepped through the door, and then he turned and tilted his head slightly as he studied me. I couldn’t help but stare at his chest—this was the first time I’d seen him anywhere near undressed—that ball of need that refused to be satisfied jumping to life with just that one sight.

“Coming?”

I don’t even remember stripping off my sweatshirt, but I must have done it as I walked to the bathroom because I would find it on the floor beside his shirt the next morning. And then his mouth was on mine again and we fumbled with a certain amount of urgency, as he backed into the bathroom, pulling me with him until he nearly fell into the sink. I found myself standing between his legs as he tugged at the stubborn button of my jeans, and I fumbled with the Italian leather belt around his waist. I gained release first, tearing the belt from his pants before I managed to undo the zipper, dropping to my knees as it exposed his boxer briefs underneath.

I’d never done anything like this before. I wasn’t a prude. I knew the basic mechanics. But the few boys I had been with had been more interested in other aspects of the sex act than this. One had actually told me he preferred to save oral sex for times when his girl couldn’t offer a good fuck for one reason or another.

Who knew?

But Conrad didn’t seem to mind either my desire to taste him, or the fact that it took me a few tries to figure out how to keep my teeth out of the way. And once I did…his fingers buried in my hair were enough to tell me I was doing it right. His moans were enough for me to know he was getting everything he could want out of my touch.

It was like silk the way his cock slid over my tongue. And it tasted like…so many different things. I, like the other girls at my private Catholic school, had giggled in the back of the gym about things like this, trying to figure out what the appeal was to women much older than ourselves. It didn’t seem like anything I would ever want to do. But now…now I wanted to taste, to touch, to feel everything.