by Mandy Rosko
Heat climbed up her chest and neck. She couldn’t wipe the angry look off her face, even though she was probably blushing like someone who was not at all confidant in what she was doing.
“What would be the problem?”
Isla cleared her throat. “What are you thinking?”
The look on Arturo’s face didn’t change. He looked at her like he didn’t even know her. “Just tell me what the problem is.”
She exploded at him. “Forty-Nine percent? Are you kidding me? You’re only going to give back forty-nine percent?”
“Is there something strange about that?”
“I’m going to be outside,” Orlando said. He was shaking his head, like he couldn’t handle listening to anymore of this.
It seemed he didn’t want to bother with trying to protect his brother anymore. Arturo was officially on his own.
Which was terrible, because when Orlando left, Isla suddenly felt like she’d lost her backup and most of her courage.
Great.
Arturo waited until the door closed behind his brother before he said anything. “Forty-nine percent is standard if I want to keep control of the business.”
“You weren’t supposed to keep control!” Isla yelled. She wanted to strangle him. She really did. “The deal was that you hand over the entire business to me and my family.”
“Yes, after spending four weeks with me under my terms. If I felt the need to cancel our contract at any time, then I was under no obligation to give back any percentage of the business.”
Isla was probably red in the face right about now. She was probably on the verge of giving herself a nosebleed with all the blood rushing to her cheeks.
“So, because I spent only half the time with you, I get only half the business?”
“Technically, you spent less than half the time with me.”
Isla spoke through clenched teeth. “Because you were working.”
Arturo rolled his eyes. “It’s not just about that. It’s for your parents.”
Isla couldn’t believe it. “I swear to God, I really am struggling to keep from losing my mind.”
He actually smirked at that. “Are you?”
“Shut up. Just tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”
He shook his head. “Did you tell your parents that we’re not together anymore?”
“Considering we were never together and I got kicked out the day after you sat down to dinner with them, no.”
She’d gotten a few texts from her mother since that night, along with a couple of calls that she hadn’t picked up.
Of course, her mother had to make her feel guilty—as mothers usually do—without even knowing she was doing it, by talking about what a nice young man she’d landed and asking when could they meet up for lunch?
Isla had remained vague in her responses. She was easing her mother into the fact that she wouldn’t be seeing much of Arturo around anymore. She was pretending she and Arturo were still seeing each other, but not so much lately because Arturo was a super-busy businessman and he had a ton of stuff to do.
That way, when Isla told her mother that she and Arturo broke up, she wouldn’t be too shocked.
“Okay,” Arturo said, “so consider this, if I just handed over 100 percent of the business to you after your parents just met me in person for the first time, do you think your father or grandfather would get suspicious? You’re the one who didn’t want them knowing you were sleeping with me to get the business back.”
“That is not… oh,” Isla said. It did kind of make sense.
Arturo nodded. “But, if I were to hand over 49 percent of the business to you and your family, I would still be the full owner, all decisions would still come down to me, it’s still mine. The big difference is that it’s just as much as I can give to my fake girlfriend as a present without looking suspicious.”
“Normal people don’t give their girlfriends 49 percent of multi-million dollar business.”
“Normal people don’t have twenty billion dollars in their accounts.”
That heat came back into Isla’s face. She hated being reminded that he could buy her business a couple thousand times over, destroy it, or give it away and not even blink over it.
Arturo pulled a pen from his pocket. A pen that probably cost two hundred dollars. He handed it to her. “Sign the papers. You can keep your share, or hand it over to whoever you want in your family. It’s yours to do whatever you want with.”
He wasn’t speaking so coldly to her anymore. She didn’t understand him at all, but now she felt more than a little compelled to sign her name where it belonged on the contract.
She looked up at him then down at the crumpled papers.
Arturo stepped aside and pointed his hand to his shiny, big desk. “You can sign them on there if you want.”
Isla swallowed, then she nodded. She walked to his desk and laid the papers down. She felt Arturo staring at the back of her head as she leaned down, smoothed out the papers, and then signed her name on all the dotted lines.
This felt so much different from the last time she’d signed a contract from Arturo. He wasn’t speaking coldly to her anymore, but this contract felt cold. It was so strange to be signing something that didn’t require her to give him sex.
That was the even stranger part. The fact that she felt strange about signing something so legal and normal shouldn’t have been happening, but it was. When her name was there in her normal, pretty script in black ink, something suddenly felt closed off.
Isla stood straight and really looked at her name. Her heart ached, her wrist ached where Arturo had touched her earlier, and even her ribs seemed to ache.
Everything hurt, and all because there was nothing in this contract that stated she had to spend time with Arturo, a man she couldn’t stand a couple of weeks ago.
“Everything all right?”
She turned and looked back at him, her fingers barely holding onto the papers in her hands.
A light frown pulled at Arturo’s dark brows, and Isla realized what he looked so worried about.
She wiped her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes burned and it was obvious she was about to start. “Sorry,” she said, trying to laugh it off, but failing. “I’m just really happy about this, is all.”
Arturo seemed to buy her excuse. “That’s good, considering you looked like you wanted to claw my eyes out a second ago.”
She still kind of did, knowing what she knew now and thinking back to that blonde that had been giving him a lap dance only a couple of minutes ago.
She bit that back. It wasn’t her business. It never had been. Even if there was a chance of it being any of her business, there was nothing between them now, so she had nothing to complain about.
Arturo approached her. He didn’t touch her, but his hands reached for the contract. He held onto one side while Isla held onto the other. He was taking it. When he took it and she let go, there wouldn’t be anything connecting them anymore.
She let go of it.
Arturo smiled softly at her. She couldn’t get a proper read on his face. She couldn’t get a proper read on anything anymore.
She wanted to say something to him, to let him know what she’d just realized, but the thought of that woman on his lap, of him telling her she needed to go….
She couldn’t do it.
Arturo wet his lips. He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call Sam. He’ll take you wherever you need to go.”
Isla cleared her throat. “Right, uh, thanks for that.”
She quickly started walking to the door. She needed to get out of here. It was too awkward, and if she stayed any longer, she thought she might actually die from how humiliated she was.
The worst part was how she felt like everything was all wide open for Arturo to see. She didn’t want anyone to see her like this.
“Isla,” Arturo called.
She was already pushing the doors open.
She walke
d out into the lobby. Sylvia saw her there, but Isla passed her quickly.
“Miss King? I think Mr. Calendri is calling for you.”
“Isla?” Orlando asked.
She pretended to not hear them either as she pressed the button for the elevator. She multi-tapped it like that would make the doors open faster.
It took forever before they did. Or it seemed to.
When she finally got into the elevator and pressed the button for the parking lot, she leaned her back against the wall and looked out one last time at Arturo’s doors. She’d kind of hoped he would be there, rushing out to stop her or something, just like in one of Jane’s romance novels.
The doors slid shut and she descended. Orlando and Sylvia were clearly confused, but she just needed to get out of here.
Right, of course he wasn’t going to stop her. This wasn’t a game anymore and that stuff only happened in wild fantasies.
Isla wiped her face with her hands and sniffed.
The only thing remotely close to being out of a romance novel was the fucked-up situation itself. She’d actually fallen for a man who’d been using her for sex. She was never going to say it out loud, but in her head, she couldn’t stop the words from forming.
She actually loved the bastard, and that fact was never going to make her happy.
40
Silvio wasn’t back at the apartment when Isla came back. In a weird way, she’d been hoping to see him, even though he was there for Jane.
He didn’t show up the next day either. Or the next day. Or the day after that. It seemed as though an entire month had gone by when Isla realized she hadn’t heard a thing from anyone in Arturo’s circles, which was when she’d realized why she’d hoped to see Silvio around.
If he was around, then Isla could pretend she still had some connection to Arturo.
Jane acted like she didn’t know anything was going on. She didn’t mention Silvio’s name, or confirm or deny what Isla thought had happened after she had left.
That made things awkward in the beginning. Isla wanted to know how she’d even met Silvio and why was she so embarrassed to have any sort of connection with him? Was it because she wrote billionaire romances? Maybe it was embarrassing for her to be a writer in that genre, while actually knowing a real billionaire.
It was hard to sexualize a person when they had a real face and a life, and weren’t just text on a page or an actor on the big screen.
Isla felt sorry for Jane, but she wasn’t a good enough person to spare much of even that pitiful emotion.
She was still wallowing in her own self-pity and trying to forget that the very thought of Arturo made her heart thump in all the wrong ways.
She loved the bastard. She loved him, and her plan to get close enough to be considered a friend, to make him feel guilty for getting her to sign that contract, had backfired spectacularly in her face. Now there wasn’t anything between them. She hadn’t so much as received a call or a text, and she’d certainly never heard anything back from Orlando, Silvio, or even Sam or Martina.
She missed those two especially.
Isla had heard from the lawyers, of course, people who wanted to make sure the transfer of 49 percent of a multi-million dollar company in Isla’s name went smoothly.
And it did. For what had to be the first time in the history of any business transaction of this size, everything was clear skies and smooth sailing.
Arturo had even arranged to continue operations of her share of the business until she was ready to tell her parents that she had it, and then hand it over to the people who knew what they were doing better than she did.
Which she hadn’t done yet.
Isla knew Arturo’s phone number. She had lived in his house for a little over two weeks, after all, but when the time came that she was ready to explain to her parents that her adoring billionaire boyfriend was handing over part of his girlfriend’s family business, Isla was to call his lawyers, who would then relay the message to him.
She wasn’t supposed to call Arturo personally.
Isla stayed in bed, staring at her phone, staring at the screen with Arturo’s name and number on it. She imagined calling him right now just for the hell of it, just to hear his voice, but then her imagination quickly filled in what would happen next.
He’d know it was her. He had to have caller ID, and if he didn’t have it and didn’t recognize her number, then Isla would hang up the second he picked up and said a single word.
Her stomach constricted at the thought, as though it was something that had already happened.
But then she’d hear his voice.
She stared at the screen of her phone, looking at the black pixels that spelled out his name, and thought about calling.
She turned off her phone and stuck it under her pillow. The level of pathetic that oozed from her was impressive in its sadness.
She hadn’t showered in three days. Hadn’t sketched any new designs, despite the fact that having the business back, or part of it, meant she’d be going back to work soon. She hadn’t even opened up her kits or made anything out of her many supplies. Her body was tired. So was her mind. She thought about doing these things, but even as she imagined her legs and arms moving, or jumping out of bed and hoping into the shower and starting her day—at one in the afternoon—her body wouldn’t cooperate. Her fingers didn’t even twitch.
Tired but wide awake. Wanting to sleep, but couldn’t. Wanting to move, but couldn’t. She didn’t even know how long it had been since she’d eaten, but her stomach didn’t growl for food.
And all because she loved someone who didn’t love her. Isla didn’t think she’d ever been in love before. Not if this was what the heartbreak of real love felt like.
No wonder she’d never fallen in love before. She swore to herself that the second she got over this, she was never going to fall for anyone ever again.
Well, no, okay that was kind of dumb. She didn’t exactly want to turn into the crazy cat lady. When she got over Arturo, she was going to find someone else to love, but she was going to be smart about it. She wouldn’t just let the stupid emotion sneak up on her when she wasn’t paying attention, and she wouldn’t feel anything she wasn’t supposed to just because Arturo’s life story made her feel sorry for him.
Isla was a perfectly normal adult female. A lot of women had a desire to be nurturers. That was all it was. Arturo’s history with his father, his family, and his aloof nature had made her want to take care of him.
She’d intended to walk away from the entire thing with him feeling guilty for using her after she showed him what an outstanding individual she was, but in the end, she was the one who had been pulled in.
She didn’t even care if that was a clinical and somewhat heartless way of looking at it. It had to be the truth. How else did she explain how she was feeling right now?
She could stay in this bed forever.
She didn’t even flinch when her door burst open.
“All right! That’s it! I’ve had enough!”
Jane marched into Isla’s room, around her bed, and was then within sight. Her spine was straight, shoulders were back, and her straight brunette hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She looked like a woman about to take charge of…whatever it was that she wanted.
And apparently, she wanted the sheets on Isla’s bed, because she grabbed onto them tight and yanked them off Isla’s body, making them fly across the room like they were made to sail in the air.
Isla glanced at her friend. “What do you want?”
“You’re still in your pajamas!” Jane snapped. “Jesus, girl, what’s with you? I know you liked him and everything, but enough is enough!”
Jane then wrinkled her nose. “Your hair looks like a complete mess. When was the last time you had a bath?”
“Three days ago.”
Jane lifted a perfectly sculpted brow. “Three days?”
“On Friday.”
Jane just stared at her. T
hen she exploded. “Friday was five days ago! Get your disgusting butt into the bathroom now!”
Isla blinked up at her friend. “Five days ago?”
Jane crossed her arms.
The itch Isla felt on her skin did seem a little stronger than usual, and with those shrewd eyes on her, knowing what she knew…
Isla pulled herself out of bed, letting her weak feet touch the ground for the first time in a hundred years. “All right.”
* * *
The shower did help, especially since Isla stayed under the water for a good hour. She shaved her legs, shampooed and conditioned her hair twice, scrubbed her face and body of all the dead skin she had—which was a disgusting amount; —and then used her in-the-shower moisturizer to really bring herself back to normal.
She felt kind of good when it came time to get out of the shower.
Isla was also reminded of just how hungry she was, and she went in search of food.
Jane was, unfortunately, sitting at the little table in the equally small space that passed for their kitchen. She was holding onto a mug in both of her hands.
“Don’t tell me we have to have a talk now,” Isla said, praying that wasn’t what this was about.
She felt better after having her shower, but that didn’t mean she wanted to spill her guts to anyone, even Jane, about what she was feeling for Arturo.
Jane scoffed and lifted her mug to her lips. “I could be just having a coffee, you know.”
“Sure,” Isla said, smiling and walking past her friend. She rummaged through the fridge, pulled out an apple, some orange juice, and some eggs and cheese.
She was totally going to reward herself with something delicious and fattening, and not because she was depressed.
Jane stayed mostly silent while Isla fried her egg. Shit, had she actually pissed Jane off with that last comment?
Glancing over her shoulder, Isla was able to breathe a heavy sigh when she realized that, no, Jane wasn’t giving her the silent treatment. She had a mechanical pencil in her hand and was staring down at an open notebook.
Jane liked writing things out in long hand before she went to her computer, especially her character designs.